Arnold Toynbee - War and Civilization

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War and Civilization
SELECTED BY ALBERT V. FOWLER
a study of history and this selection from it

are issued under the auspices
of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
The Royal Institute of International Affairs
is an unofficial and non-political body,
founded in 1920 to encourage and facilitate
the scientific study of international questions.
The Institute, as such, is precluded by its rules
from expressing an opinion on any aspect
of international affairs;
opinions expressed in this book are, therefore,
purely individual.
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE
FROM A STUDY OF HISTORY
NEW YORK
'vtxf WjI
Oxford University Press
1950
Copyright 1950 by Oxford, University Press, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
owraff
editor’s preface
Only here and there throughout the course of the six volumes
of A Study of History does Mr. Toynbee assume the role
of prophet, pointing out to his fellows the grave consequences
of their acts and calling them to repent of their waywardness.
When some of these scattered passages are culled out and
fitted together and brought to bear on the single problem of
War in our contemporary life, Mr. Toynbee stands forth in
the full power and eloquence of his prophetic role. Here he
is examining in the long perspective of the past the present
situation of living nations as they face the mounting menace
of Militarism, and what he says about them is sharply alive and
touches all of us to the quick. His comments are disturbing
and are meant to disturb. The statesman, the soldier, the
teacher, the pacifist—all are stirred to consider the question of
War in a new light. Believing that nations like individuals can
win salvation even at the eleventh hour and that the oppor¬
tunity is open to them as long as life endures, Mr. Toynbee
tells us ‘we may and must pray that a reprieve which God
has granted to our society once will not be refused if we ask
for it again in a contrite spirit and with a broken heart.’
The high ground of Civilization which Mankind has won
is again being swept by the scourge of Militarism because we
still put our trust in the arts of War. There is higher ground
ahead where, as Saint Paul assured the early Christians, ‘though
v/
49897
VI editor’s preface
we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh (for the
weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through
God to the pulling down of strong holds).’ But there is also
lower ground behind, and Mr. Toynbee realizes that if our
society is unable to spiritualize its aggressive tendencies, it is
better for it to practice the arts of War in the flesh rather than
leave its house swept and empty for the invasion of even
worse devils. Though he looks with the historian’s unblinking
eyes at all the horrors implicit and explicit in modern war¬
fare, he sees that there is a social disintegration more to be
feared than War itself, and if forced to choose between them,
he would prefer War as the lesser evil.
Mr. Toynbee is aware, as few men can be, of the precarious¬
ness of our present plight in the desperate struggle against
Militarism. He is fully conscious of the fact that only by win¬
ning the new ground ahead can we ultimately emerge vic¬
torious. But he is never so intent on the future that he does
not keep an open eye on the past, never so preoccupied with
the next step forward that he does not constantly bear in mind
the danger of a misstep that will throw us back toward the
chaotic past out of which civilized man has struggled. His
insight into the hidden ways of man’s being has convinced him
that, should a nation or an individual attempt the new warfare
whose weapons are not carnal before the necessary ground¬
work and training for it has been accomplished, that nation
or individual would create a spiritual vacuum inviting a host
of evils more terrible than the old warfare waged in the flesh.
Armed as never before with a foreknowledge of the suicidal
consequences of Militarism, the nations today have the means,
Mr. Toynbee believes, to hold Militarism at bay until they
work out a method of settling their conflicts without resort
to War.
Albert V. Fowler
PREFACE
The contents of this small volume have been extracted, by

Mr. Albert Fowler, in consultation with the author, from the
first six comparatively large volumes of a work that will prob¬
ably run to nine volumes of this larger size when the rest of it
is published. The extracts have been chosen to illustrate what
the writer of A Study of History has to say about War; and this
common subject gives them a unity; but the reader of the
present booklet is asked to bear in mind that here he will not
be reading these passages in their original context, and that
War is not the main theme of the work from which they have
been taken—though unhappily it is impossible to study the his¬
tory of Mankind since the emergence, some five or six thou¬
sand years ago, of societies of the species known as civiliza¬
tions without finding that the institution of War lies close
to the heart of this tragic subject.
In studying the breakdowns of civilizations, the writer has
indeed subscribed to the conclusion—no new discovery!—that
War has proved to have been the proximate cause of the
breakdown of every civilization which is known for certain
to have broken down, in so far as it has been possible to
analyze the nature of these breakdowns and to account for
their occurrence. There have been other sinister institutions
besides War with which Mankind has afflicted itself during its
age of Civilization; Slavery is one of these self-inflicted
vm PREFACE
scourges that leaps at once to our minds; yet, though Slavery,

Caste, the Conflict of Classes, Economic Injustice, and many
other social symptoms of the nemesis of Original Sin have
played their part as instruments of Man’s self-torment, War
stands out among the rest as Man’s principal engine of social
and spiritual self-defeat during a period of his history which
he is now beginning to be able to see in perspective.
A comparative survey of the known breakdowns of civiliza¬
tions shows that social breakdown is a tragedy with a plot
that has the institution of War for its key. Indeed War may
actually have been a child of Civilization, since the possibility
of waging war pre-supposes a minimum of technique and or¬
ganization and surplus wealth beyond what is needed for bare
subsistence, and these sinews of War were lacking to Primi¬
tive Man, while, on the other hand, we know of no civiliza¬
tion (with the possible exception of the Mayan, of which our
knowledge up to date is only fragmentary) in whose life War
has not been an established and dominant institution already
at the earliest stage to which we can trace any civilization’s
history back.
Like other evils, War has an insidious way of appearing not
intolerable until it has secured such a stranglehold upon the
lives of its addicts that they no longer have the power to
escape from its grip when its deadliness has become manifest.
In the early stages of a civilization’s growth, the cost of wars
in suffering and destruction might seem to be exceeded by the
benefits accruing from the winning of wealth and power and
the cultivation of the ‘military virtues’; and, in this phase of
history, States have often found themselves able to indulge
in War with one another with something like impunity even
for the defeated party. War does not begin to reveal its malig¬
nity till the war-making society has begun to increase its
economic ability to exploit Physical Nature and its political
PREFACE IX
ability to organize ‘man-power’; but, as soon as this happens,

the God of War to which the growing society has long since
been dedicated proves himself a Moloch by devouring an
ever larger share of the increasing fruits of Man’s industry and
intelligence in the process of taking an ever larger toll of life
and happiness; and, when the society’s growth in efficiency
reaches a point at which it becomes capable of mobilizing a
lethal quantum of its energies and resources for military use,
then War reveals itself as being a cancer which is bound to
prove fatal to its victim unless he can cut it out and cast
it from him, since its malignant tissues have now learnt to
grow faster than the healthy tissues on which they feed.
In the past, when this danger-point in the history of the
relations between War and Civilization has been reached and
recognized, serious efforts have sometimes been made to get
rid of War in time to save society, and these endeavours have
been apt to take one or other of two alternative directions.
Salvation cannot, of course, be sought anywhere except in the
working of the consciences of individual human beings; but
individuals have a choice between trying to achieve their aims
through direct action as private persons and trying to achieve
them through indirect action as citizens of States. A personal
refusal to lend himself in any way to any war waged by his
State for any purpose and in any circumstances is a line of
attack against the institution of War that is likely to appeal
to an ardent and self-sacrificing nature; by comparison, the
alternative peace strategy of seeking to persuade and accustom
Governments to combine in jointly resisting aggression when
it comes and in trying to remove its stimuli beforehand may
seem a circuitous and unheroic line of attack on the problem.
Yet experience up to date indicates unmistakably, in the pres¬
ent writer’s opinion, that the second of these two hard roads
is by far the more promising.
X PREFACE
The most obvious lion in the path of the strategy of Paci¬

fism is the prospect which Pacifists have to face that, in so
far as their action might prove effective, its first effect would
be to put States in which Pacifism was an appreciably strong
political force at the mercy of States in which it was impotent;
and this would mean allowing the most unscrupulous Govern¬
ments of the most benighted military Powers to make them¬
selves masters of the World in the first chapter of the story.
To face this prospect and submit to its immediate conse¬
quences pre-supposes an active foresight and a passive heroism
that has been exhibited by saints but never by ordinary man¬
kind in the mass. Peoples have, of course, frequently submitted
en masse to the pain and grief of being oppressed by con¬
querors who have been brutal and barbarous by comparison
with their victims. In a.d. 1940 the world came within an ace
of thus submitting to the domination of a Germany controlled
by the Nazis and inspired by Hitler’s Satanic spirit; but we have
only to recall the temper prevalent in France and Great
Britain during the years of ‘appeasement’ and thereafter in
France in the era of Vichy to realize the truth that, among
the motives inspiring a mass-refusal to resist military aggres¬
sion by force of arms in self-defence, the Saint’s unselfish
horror of committing the sin of War is apt to count for much
less than the ordinary mortal’s natural aversion from being
required to pay the awful price in blood and tears which War
exacts.
A willingness to pay this price is the root of the so-called
"‘military virtues’ without which War cannot be waged and,
but for which, this evil institution would assuredly never have
been condoned, as it has been till recently, by the public
opinion and feeling of a majority of Mankind in societies in
process of civilization. This traditional term ‘military virtues’
is, of course, misleading, since all virtues exhibited in war have
PREFACE XI
also an unlimited scope in other forms of human encounter

and intercourse, while, on the other hand, the exhibition of
these virtues by soldiers has unhappily often proved to be
compatible with a simultaneous exhibition of cruelty, rapacity,
and a host of further vices. In a contest of virtue between the
Warrior using violence and the Saint eschewing it, the Saint
would win a moral victory to-day which would bear practical
fruits tomorrow; but unfortunately the typical characters in
the drama of Pacifism versus War are not a Warrior and a
Saint both clad in the same panoply of righteousness; they are
the Warrior—virtuous or vicious—who has the courage to risk
life and limb, and the ordinary mortal who flinches from the
toil and danger; and, as we discovered for ourselves in a.d.
1939 and 1940, the unheroic character that is moved to shrink
from War by the common infirmity of human nature, and
not by the horror of committing a sin, had better try to rise
at any rate to the Warrior’s level if he knows that the Saint’s
altitude is beyond his reach.
By rising to the Warrior’s level in the world wars of a.d.
1914-18 and a.d. 1939-45, unaggressive peoples did exercise the
cardinal virtues in War to such good effect that they twice de¬
feated a militarist empire’s long-prepared attempt to conquer
the World; and, in winning these successive victories at a fear¬
ful cost in blood and tears, they twice bought for our society
an opportunity to get rid of War by a better way than sub¬
mission to a world-conqueror’s forcibly imposed Pax Oecu-
menica. The first of these two opportunities was thrown away,
and the Second World War was our penalty for this flagrant
fault of heart and head. The second opportunity lies in our
hands to-day. Are we going to take it? What the situation
manifestly demands is a voluntary association of the peace-
loving peoples of the World in sufficient force and cohesion
to be unassailable by any who reject their pact of collective
Xll PREFACE
security or who break it; and this peace-keeping world-power

must not only be sufficiently preponderant in strength to make
attacks upon it hopeless; it must also be sufficiently just and
wise in the use of its power to avoid the provocation of any
serious wish to challenge its authority.
This task, immense though it is, is not beyond our ability.
Mankind’s past successes in bringing once sovereign inde¬
pendent States into voluntary union with one another are
guarantees that we possess the experience and technique for
achieving the great work of political construction that is now
demanded of us. We have the ability if we have the will. Our
fate lies in our own hands.
London Arnold J. Toynbee
June 1950
CONTENTS
Preface by Arnold J. Toynbee O
y \. The War-Stricken World of To-Day, 3

- 11. Militarism and the Military Virtues, 12 c
in. Sparta, the Military State, 26 C
iv. Assyria, the Strong Man Armed, 55

v. The Burden of Nineveh; Charlemagne and Timur Lenk, 78
vi. The Intoxication of Victory, 104
vii. Goliath and David, 112

viii. The Price of Progress in Military Technique, 130©
ix. The Failure of the Saviour with the Sword, 142

’
*
CHAPTER I
The War-Stricken World of To-day
Unlike our forebears, we in our generation feel from the depths

of our hearts that a Pax Oecumenica is now a crying need. We
live in daily dread of a catastrophe which, we fear, may over¬
take us if the problem of meeting this need is left unsolved
much longer. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that
the shadow of this fear that now lies athwart our future is
hypnotizing us into a spiritual paralysis that is beginning to
affect us even in the trivial avocations of our daily life. And,
if we can screw up the courage to look this fear in the face,
we shall not be rewarded by finding ourselves able to dismiss
it with contempt as nothing but a panic phobia. The sting of
this fear lies in the undeniable fact that it springs from a ra¬
tional root.
We are terribly afraid of the immediate future because we
have been through a horrible experience in the recent past.
And the lesson which this experience has impressed upon our
minds is indeed an appalling one. In our generation we have
learnt, through suffering, two home truths. The first truth is
that the institution of War is still in full force in our Western
Society. The second truth is that, in the Western World under
existing technical and social conditions, there can be no war¬
fare that is not internecine. These truths have been driven home
by our experience in the General Wars of a.d. 1914-18 and
WAR AND CIVILIZATION
4
1939-45; t>ut t^ie most ominous thing about these wars is that
they were not isolated or unprecedented calamities. They were
two wars in a series; and, when we envisage the whole series
in a synoptic view, we discover that this is not only a series
but also a progression. In our recent Western history war has
been following war in an ascending order of intensity; and
to-day it is already apparent that the War of 1939-45 was not
the climax of this crescendo movement. If the series continues,
the progression will indubitably be carried to ever higher terms,
until this process of intensifying the horrors of war is one day
brought to an end by the self-annihilation of the war-making
society.
We may now remind ourselves that this progressive series of
Western wars, of which the War of 1939-45 has been the latest
but perhaps not the last, is one of two chapters of a story that
we have already studied in another context. We have observed
that the history of our Western warfare in the so-called
‘Modern Age’ can be analyzed into two bouts which are sepa¬
rated from one another chronologically by an intervening lull
and are also distinguished from one another qualitatively by a
difference in the object—or at any rate in the pretext—of the
hostilities. The first bout consists of the Wars of Religion,
which began in the sixteenth century and ceased in the seven¬
teenth. The second bout consists of the Wars of Nationality,
which began in the eighteenth century and are still the scourge
of the twentieth. These ferocious Wars of Religion and fero¬
cious Wars of Nationality have been separated by an interlude
of moderate wars that were fought as ‘the Sport of Kings.’
This interlude manifestly did not begin on the Continent till
after the end of the Thirty Years’ War in a.d. 1648, and in
Great Britain not till after the Restoration of the Monarchy
in England in a.d. 1660; and it is equally manifest that the lull
did not outlast the outbreak of the French Revolutionary War
THE WAR-STRICKEN WORLD OF TO-DAY 5
in a.d. 1792, even if we leave it an open question whether it
survived the American Revolutionary War of a.d. 1775-83. On
a narrower reckoning we might confine the Time-span of the
‘Golden Age’ of eighteenth-century moderation between the
dates a.d. 1732 and a.d. 1755, if the eviction of a Protestant
minority from the Catholic ecclesiastical principality of Salz¬
burg in a.d. 1731-2 is to be taken as the last positive act of re¬
ligious persecution in Western Europe, and the eviction of a
French population from Acadia in a.d. 1755 as the first positive
act of persecution for Nationality’s sake in North America. In
any case the interlude is palpable; and, whatever dates we may
choose to adopt as the props for a conventional scheme of
chronological demarcation, the play will fall into the same
three acts in the same sequence, and this sequence of acts will
present the same plot. This underlying plot, and not the super¬
ficial time-table, is the feature that is of interest for our present
purpose. And in the plot of this three-act play, with its couple
of bouts of ferocious warfare and an interlude of moderate
warfare in between them, can we not discern the pattern of a
couple of paroxysms, separated by a breathing-space, in which
we may recognize the hall-mark of a ‘Time of Troubles’ fol¬
lowing a breakdown? If we scrutinize in this light the picture
that is presented by the modern history of our Western World,
we shall find that the cap does at any rate fit to a nicety.
If the outbreak of the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth cen¬
tury is to be taken as a symptom of social breakdown, then the
first rally of a since then disintegrating Western Society is to
be seen in the movement in favour of religious toleration
which gained the upper hand, and brought the Wars of Reli¬
gion to an end, in the course of the seventeenth century. This
victory of the Principle of Toleration in the religious sphere
duly won for several succeeding generations that interlude of
moderation which gave an ailing Western World a welcome
6 WAR AND CIVILIZATION
breathing-space between a first and a second paroxysm of its

deadly seizure. And the cap fits again when we observe the
fact that the relief was only temporary and not permanent, and
when we go on to inquire into the reason. For an empirical
study of the rhythm of the disintegration-process leads us to
expect to see a rally give way to a relapse; and it also leads us
to expect to find that this monotonously repeated tale of fail¬
ure can be explained in each case by some particular element
of weakness by which the abortive rally has been vitiated. Are
these expectations fulfilled in the Western case in point? We
are bound to reply that, in this case too, the reason for the
failure of the rally is as clear as the fact of it is conspicuous.
Our modern Western Principle of Toleration has failed to
bring salvation after all because (as we must confess) there
has been no health in it. The spirits that presided over its con¬
ception and birth were Disillusionment, Apprehension and
Cynicism, not Faith, Hope, and Charity; the impulse was nega¬
tive, not positive; and the soil in which the seeds were sown
was arid.
Some fell upon stony places where they had not much earth, and
ort wit t ey sprung up because they had no deepness of earth-
and when the Sun was up they were scorched, and because they
had no root they withered away. :
A Principle of Toleration which unexpectedly clothed the

stony heart of our modern Western Christendom in a sudden
crop of fresh verdure when the fierce sun of religious fanati¬
cism had burnt itself out into dust and ashes, has wilted-no
less suddenly and no less unexpectedly-now that the fiercer
sun of national fanaticism has burst blazing through the firma¬
ment. In the twentieth century we are seeing our seventeenth-
century Toleration making an unconditional surrender to a
masterful demon whose onslaught it has proved incapable of
withstanding. And the cause of this disastrous impotence is

manifest.
A Toleration that has no roots in Faith has failed to retain
any hold upon the heart of Homo Occidentalis because human
nature abhors a spiritual vacuum. If the house from which an
unclean spirit has gone out is left empty, swept, and garnished,
the momentarily banished possessor will sooner or later enter
in again with a retinue of other spirits more wicked than him¬
self, and the last state of that man will be worse than the first.
The Wars of Nationalism are more wicked than the Wars of
Religion because the object—or pretext—of the hostilities is less
sublime and less etherial. The moral is that hungry souls which
have been given a stone when they have asked for bread can¬
not be restrained from seeking to satisfy their hunger by de¬
vouring the first piece of carrion that comes their way. They
will not be deterred by a warning from the giver of the stone
that the heaven-sent carrion is poisoned; and, even when the
threatened agonies duly begin to wrack the miserable scaven¬
gers’ entrails, they will persist in feasting upon the tainted meat
with an unabated appetite until death extinguishes their greed
—as once in Sicily a routed Athenian army that had gone mad
with thirst as it walked through dry places, seeking rest and
finding none, drank heedlessly of the waters of the River Asi-
narus while the enemy was shooting them down from the bank
and the stream was running foully red with the blood of the
dying drinkers’ already slaughtered comrades.
There is yet another point in which our modem Western
history conforms to the pattern of a disintegrating society’s
‘Time of Troubles’; and this is perhaps the most alarming of
all these points of congruence. Our survey has shown us that,
as a rule, the paroxysm which follows the intermediate breath¬
ing-space is more violent than the paroxysm which precedes it;
and this rule is certainly exemplified in our Western case if the
Wars of Nationality are to be taken as the second paroxysm

of our seizure and the Wars of Religion as the first.
Our forebears who fought that earlier cycle of ferocious
Western wars may not have been behindhand in the will to
work havoc, but-fortunately for themselves and for their de¬
scendants—they lacked the means which we now have at our
command unfortunately for our children and for ourselves.
No doubt the Wars of Religion were much worse—and this in
point both of rancour and of command of resources and of
technical ability to turn these resources to account—than the
Western warfare of previous ages in which our Western Chris¬
tendom was still unquestionably in growth. The Wars of Re¬
ligion had been anticipated by the invention of gunpowder
and by voyages of discovery that, at least on the material
plane, had extended the range of the Western Society from
one small corner of the Eurasian Continent to the hinterlands
of all the navigable seas on the face of the planet. The bullion
that had been accumulating in the treasuries at Tenochtitlan
and Cuzco was ultimately expended on paying mercenaries to
fight m the Wars of Religion on European battle-fields, after
the discovery, conquest, and rifling of the Central American
and Andean worlds by the Spanish conquistadores-just as,
“ corresPonding geographical expansion of the Hellenic
or d through the exploits of Alexander, the treasures piled
up by Achaemenian policy at Ecbatana and Susa found their
way into the hands of mercenaries who fought in the wars of
Alexander’s diadochi and epigoni on battle-fields in Greece.
nd the professional soldiery that was maintained in a six¬
teenth-century and seventeenth-century Western World out
of this sudden huge increase in the Western princes’ supplies
of the precious metals was not only more numerous than the
old feudal militia of Transalpine Western Europe. It was also
more formidably armed and, worse still, more ferociously en-
raged against an enemy who now, as a rule, was not only a
military opponent but was also a religious miscreant in the eyes
of his adversary. The unprecedented violence with which the
Wars of Religion were imbued by the combined operation of
these several causes would doubtless have shocked both Saint
Louis and the Emperor Frederick II if they could have re¬
turned to life to witness the Western warfare of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. But we may also as confidently pre¬
sume that the Duke of Alva and Gustavus Adolphus would
have been shocked to an equal degree if they, in their turn,
could have returned to life to witness the subsequent Wars of
Nationality. This later cycle of ferocious Western wars which
began in the eighteenth century, and which has not ceased in
the twentieth, has been keyed up to an unprecedented de¬
gree of ferocity by the titanic driving-power of two forces—
Democracy and Industrialism—which have entered into the
institution of War in our Western World in these latter days
when that world has now virtually completed its stupendous
feat of incorporating the whole face of the Earth and the
entire living generation of Mankind into its own body mate¬
rial. Our last state is worse than our first because, in this vastly
expanded house, we are possessed to-day by devils more terrible
than any that ever tormented even our seventeenth-century and
sixteenth-century ancestors.
Are these devils to dwell in our empty and swept and gar¬
nished house till they have driven us to suicide? If the analogy
between our Western Civilization’s modern history and other
civilizations’ ‘Times of Troubles’ does extend to points of
chronology, then a Western ‘Time of Troubles’ which ap¬
pears to have begun sometime in the sixteenth century may be
expected to find its end sometime in the twentieth century;
and this prospect may well make us tremble; for in other cases
the grand finale that has wound up a ‘Time of Troubles’ and
IO WAR AND CIVILIZATION
ushered in a universal state has been a self-inflicted ‘knock-out

blow’ from which the self-stricken society has never been able
to recover. Must we, too, purchase our Pax Oecumenica at this
deadly price? The question is one which our own lips cannot
answer, since the destiny of a live civilization is necessarily as
obscure to its living members as the fate of a dead civilization
is to scholars when their only clues are undeciphered scripts
or dumb artifacts. We cannot say for certain that our doom is
at hand; and yet we have no warrant for assuming that it is
not; for that would be to assume that we are not as other men
are; and any such assumption would be at variance with every¬
thing that we know about human nature either by looking
around us or by introspection.
This dark doubt is a challenge which we cannot evade; and
our destiny depends on our response.
I dreamed, and behold I saw a man cloathed with rags, standing

in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his
hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him
open the book and read therein; and as he read he wept and trem¬
bled; and, not being able longer to contain, he broke out with a
lamentable cry saying ‘What shall I do?’
It was not without just cause that Christian was so greatly

distressed.
I am for certain informed [said he] that this our city will be
burned with fire from Heaven—in which fearful overthrow both
myself with thee my wife and you my sweet babes shall miserably
come to ruine, except (the which yet I see not) some way of es¬
cape can be found, whereby we may be delivered.
What response to this challenge is Christian going to make?

Is he going to look this way and that way as if he would run,
yet stand still because he cannot tell which way to go—until
THE WAR-STRICKEN WORLD OF TO-DAY II
the fire from Heaven duly descends upon the City of Destruc¬
tion and the wretched haverer perishes in a holocaust which
he has so dismally foreboded without ever bringing himself to
the point of fleeing from the wrath to come? Or will he begin
to run—and run on crying ‘Life! Life! Eternal Life!’—with his
eye set on a shining light and his feet bound for a distant
wicket-gate? If the answer to this question depended on no¬
body but Christian himself, our knowledge of the uniformity
of human nature might incline us to predict that Christian’s
imminent destiny was Death and not Life. But in the classic
version of the myth we are told that the human protagonist
was not left entirely to his own resources in the hour that was
decisive for his fate. According to John Bunyan, Christian
was saved by his encounter with Evangelist. And, inasmuch as
it cannot be supposed that God’s nature is less constant than
Man’s, we may and must pray that a reprieve which God has
granted to our society once will not be refused if we ask for it
again in a contrite spirit and with a broken heart.
CHAPTER II
Militarism and the Military Virtues
That Militarism is suicidal is a proposition which will hardly

be disputed by any one whose opinion carries weight; but, if
this proposition is almost a truism, then it is unlikely to offer
a solution of the moral problem that is presented by the insti¬
tution of War; and, in fact, the word Militarism in itself im¬
plies that this suicidal and iniquitous way of using military
force is not the only way, but is rather a perversion—for which
we have to coin a special name-of an institution which is not
proved to be evil in its essence, ipso facto, by the admission
that it lends itself to a monstrous abuse.
Is War intrinsically and irredeemably evil in itself? This is
a question which cannot be shirked by any student of history
or by any member of our Western Society in our generation,
when it is the crucial question on which the destiny of our
civilization hangs. The time has come when we must grapple
with it; but, before we come to grips, we must make sure that
we are taking account of all the difficulties.
. The Srand dlfficuJty, of course, is the evident existence and
importance of ‘the military virtues.’ These confront us as a
monumental fact which cannot be whittled down or explained
away. It is one of the commonplaces of popular sociological
observation that the military peoples, castes, and classes are apt
to win more admiration from us than their neighbours who
MILITARISM AND THE MILITARY VIRTUES 13
earn their living by occupations which do not entail the risking

of one’s own life in the attempt to take some one else’s. There
is, indeed, an old-fashioned type of English military or naval
officer—nice in his sense of honour, considerate to his fellow
human beings, and kind to animals (though he enjoys killing
them for sport!)—who has been regarded, for at least two cen¬
turies past, as one of the finest English products of our West¬
ern Christian Civilization. Nor can this admiration be dismissed
with contempt as being naive or snobbish. If we look into it
seriously and with no parti pris, we shall assuredly be con¬
firmed in our belief that it is deserved. For ‘the military vir¬
tues’ are not in a class apart; they are virtues which are virtues
in every walk of life. Courage, which is the most prominent of
them, is a cardinal virtue in every action to which a human
being can set his hand—or hers; and the other virtues which
we have ascribed to our legendary colonel or commodore are
also patently legal tender in civil as well as in military life.
Colonel Newcome and the Chevalier Bayard; Coeur-de-Lion
and Roland; Olaf Tryggvason and Siegfried; Regulus and
Leonidas; Partap Singh and Prithiraj; Jalal-ad-Din Manko-
birni and ’Abdallah al-Battal; Yoshitsune Minamoto and Kuang
Yu: what a goodly company they are, and how large a place
they fill in the historical landscape of these last five or six
thousand years within which Mankind has embarked upon the
enterprise of Civilization!
What are we to make of the vein in our social tradition
which till yesterday was still inspiring heroes such as these and
which to-day still moves the rest of us to admire them? If we
wish to understand either the value of ‘the military virtues or
the sincerity of the admiration which they win, we must take
care to look at them in their native social setting; and one fea¬
ture of this which is pertinent to our present inquiry leaps
readily to the eye. ‘The military virtues’ are cultivated and ad-
J4 WAR AND CIVILIZATION
mired in a milieu in which social forces are not sharply distin¬

guished in people’s minds from the non-human natural forces,
and in which it is at the same time taken for granted that nat-
uial forces are not amenable to human control.
Down to modern times, War was almost universally regarded as

something which in itself required no justification. Its drawbacks
and horrors were, indeed, recognized, but at worst it was consid¬
ered an inevitable evil, a calamity, a scourge sent by God of the
same unavoidable nature as the plague. To a community threatened
y i ngs, or other aggressive neighbours, this was the obvious
way to regard it. From the victim’s point of view there was no dis¬
tinction m principle between the sudden incursions of such people
and those of a horde of locusts or a cloud of disease germs. But this
2 XU f the ™re,natural to adr™e and honour the prowess of
an Alfred or a Charlemagne, who could protect his people from
disaster m such circumstances. Down to modern times, though the
justification for a particular war might be questioned, and its hard¬
ship realized, fighting was all in the day’s work, an incident of hu-
ab0htl0n °f WhiCh
sibility. In these circumstances, whileWaS
fewhardly
may an imaginable
have pos¬
praised war
s'hbTnd6 /n Warri°r’ and Submitted willingly to his leader-

sh!p and control. Down to the nineteenth century'the army was
geSLtl” .“r17 Pr0feSi°n °Pen “ * -d a
The gentleman and scholar who has communicated these

observattons to the writer of this volume goes on, in the course
wLa^r’to make an iuummating comparis°"
In prehistoric times, before the domestication of animals the

hunter discharged a very necessary function in proXg food
urrounded by raiding barbarians, the soldier equally served to
make life more tolerable and justice more capable of attafnment The
finest men attached themselves to these pursuits, and theT"hieve!
1 Mr. G. M. Gathorne-Hardy in a letter to the present writer.
ments were rightly honoured, and the same type of man tends to
inherit their instincts with their qualities. But their functions have
become less necessary; in the case of the hunter, perhaps, entirely
useless.
The comparison is illuminating because, in the case of hunt¬

ing, we see a pursuit which, at a primitive level of life, has been
socially valuable and even vitally necessary becoming unques¬
tionably superfluous at an early, and a frequently attained,
stage of economic advance. At this stage the practice of hunt¬
ing for a livelihood becomes transformed, perhaps usually by
a gradual process of change, into an economically otiose
‘sport.’ On this analogy, can we posit a stage of social progress
at which the practice of War in sheer self-defence against un¬
controllable hostile forces becomes comparably transformed
into a socially otiose Militarism? On this analogy the sinister
Militarism which we can distinguish empirically from the in¬
nocent prowess of the happy warrior might perhaps be de¬
fined as a practice of War for War’s sake when the institu¬
tion has ceased both to be, and to be regarded as being, a social
necessity.
In our Western World in the so-called ‘modern’ chapter of
its history we have seen War placed on the same shelf as hunt¬
ing during an eighteenth-century ‘lull’ when War was only
in vogue as ‘the sport of kings.’ The bad name of militarist,
which glances off the armour of a Coeur-de-Lion or a Bayard,
is a Devil’s cockade which sticks fast in the tricorne of a
Charles XII or a Frederick the Great. The kings who took
their sport on the Western battle-fields of that age were mili¬
tarists beyond question. Yet, in the light of our later experi¬
ence, it has to be said in their favour that Frederick and his
kind were not the most pernicious exponents of Militarism that
were to afflict our modern Western Society. Frederick, for
example, would never have dreamed of glorifying War as it
1U WAR AND CIVILIZATION
has been glorified in a classic passage from the pen of a later

Prussian militarist, Hellmuth von Moltke.
Perpetual Peace is a dream—and not even a beautiful dream—and

War is an integral part [ein Glied] of God’s ordering of the Uni¬
verse [Weltordnung]. In War, Man’s noblest virtues come into
play [entfalten sich]: courage and renunciation, fidelity to duty
and a readiness for sacrifice that does not stop short of offering up
Life itself. Without War the World would become swamped in
materialism.
In this extravagant eulogy of War there is a note of passion,

of anxiety and of rancour which is a far cry from the urbane
and philosophic scepticism of a Frederick the Great. So pro¬
found a change of tone is presumably the echo of comparably
profound changes of temper and circumstance which had come
over the Western World within the period of less than a hun¬
dred years that had elapsed between Frederick’s death in a.d.
1786 and the year in which von Moltke wrote this letter to
Bluntschli. We can observe two such changes which are of
this magnitude.
By the time when our nineteenth-century Prussian militarist
was an old man, the eighteenth-century cultivation of War as
the sport of kings’ had, in fact, evoked two reactions which
were not only distinct but were antithetical. Both reactions
proceeded from the common postulate that to fight for fun
was shocking; but, while one school of reformers took the line
that an evil which had been turned into a sport both could and
should be abolished altogether, the other took the line that the
evi could not be borne if it were not to be endured for a
serious purpose. Thus, when the royal sportsmanship of the
eighteenth century fell into a unanimous discredit, the nine¬
teenth-century pacifists found themselves confronted by a nine¬
teenth-century brood of militarists of von Moltke’s type who
were far more formidable than their frivolous eighteenth-

century predecessors.
This quarrel over the reform of an eighteenth-century abuse
between two opposing parties of nineteenth-century ‘progres¬
sives’ perhaps accounts for von Moltke’s tone in the passage
that we have quoted. In this extravaganza he is bidding defi¬
ance to contemporary pacifists.
It is when an institution no longer appears necessary, that fan¬

tastic reasons are sought or invented for satisfying the instinctive
prejudice in its favour, which its long persistence has created. It is
just the same with the sport of the hunter; you will find its most
elaborate defence in very recent literature, precisely because what
is now challenged was at an earlier period taken for granted.-
In this contest between the pacifist who seeks to abolish ‘the

sport of kings’ and the militarist who seeks to reconvert it into
a serious business of the peoples, what are the omens to-day?
We can hardly forbear to ask a question which may be the
riddle of our Society’s destiny; but the omens, as far as we can
read them, are not at present reassuring. In our own day we
have seen von Moltke’s provocative thesis adopted as one of
the fundamental articles of their creed by the prophets of
Fascism and Naziism, and accepted with enthusiasm by the
masses whom these prophets have succeeded in converting to
their faith.
Signor Mussolini defined a Fascist militarist’s faith on two
separate occasions. Speaking at the close of the Italian army
manoeuvres in 1934, he said: ‘We are becoming and shall be¬
come so increasingly, because this is our desire—a military
nation. A militaristic nation, I will add, since we are not afraid
of words. To complete this picture: warlike-that is to say, en¬
dowed ever to a higher degree with the virtues of obedience,
2 Mr. G. M. Gathome-Hardy, in the letter quoted above.
i8 WAR AND CIVILIZATION
sacrifice, and dedication to country.’ And in an article in the

Enciclopedia ltaliana, on ‘The Doctrine of Fascism,’ he wrote:
‘War alone brings all human energies to their highest tension
and sets a seal of nobility on the peoples who have the virtue
to face it.’
This so-called ‘heroic’ attitude towards life is being wel¬
comed with open arms, and taken in deadly earnest, at this
moment by millions of young men, and the reason why it ap¬
peals to them is manifest. They are greedy for the virtues in
the form of ‘the military virtues’ because they have been
starved of other kinds of spiritual bread, like the Prodigal Son
who, when starved of human food, ‘would fain have filled his
belly with the husks that the swine did eat.’ Moreover we
know what these prodigals’ spiritual sustenance used to be,
and when their starvation began. These latter-day Western
worshippers of ‘the military virtues’ are the epigoni of genera¬
tions which were nurtured in ‘the Christian virtues’; and they
began to be starved of the traditional Christian morality, upon
which their forebears had been brought up, when, at the turn
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the unbelief of a
cultivated minority in the Western World began to infect the
less sophisticated masses.
The truth is that the spirit of Man abhors a spiritual vacuum;
and, if a human being, or a human society, has the tragic mis¬
fortune to lose a sublime inspiration by which it has once been
possessed, then, sooner or later, it will seize upon any other
spiritual food that it can find—however coarse and unsatisfying
this new fodder may be—rather than remain without any spir¬
itual sustenance at all. In the light of this truth the recent spir¬
itual history of our Western Society can be told—and the glori¬
fication of War can be explained—as follows: Owing to the
breakdown of the Hildebrandine Papacv, which was the mas¬
ter-institution of our medieval Western Christendom, our
Western Plebs Christiana received such a grievous moral shock

that the Christian way of life, in which our forebears had been
brought up, very largely lost its hold upon us; and, finding
ourselves, at the end of a series of calamities and disillusion-
ments, with our house swept and garnished by an intellectual
Aitfklarung, but untenanted by the Christian spirit that had
formerly dwelt in it, we cast about for other tenants to fill an
agonizing spiritual void. In this search we addressed ourselves
to the alternatives that lay nearest to our hand. Our Western
culture had three sources—namely, the internal proletariat and
the external proletariat and the dominant minority of the Hel¬
lenic Society to which our Western Society was ‘affiliated —
and when Christianity, which was the religious legacy of the
Hellenic internal proletariat, appeared to fail us we turned hun¬
grily to the religions of the Hellenic external proletariat and
the Hellenic dominant minority. As it happened, these two
religions were virtually the same; they were, both of them,
variants of the primitive idolatrous worship of the tribe or
state; and therefore the modern Western apostate from Chris¬
tianity, in his search after a new god, found the same idol
awaiting his adoration in whichever of the two alternative
directions he cast his eyes. Machiavelli consulting his Livy and
Rousseau his Plutarch and De Gobineau his Sturlason and
Hitler his Wagner were each led, by his respective literary or
musical oracle, to the altar-steps of the same Abomination of
Desolation: the Totalitarian Parochial State. In this pagan wor¬
ship of the parochial community—be it Hellenic or Gothic or
Scandinavian in its inspiration—the cult of ‘the military virtues
is an obligatory practice, and the glorification of War a fun¬
damental article of faith. And we can now understand why
von Moltke exclaims, with a passion which is assuredly sincere,
that ‘Perpetual Peace is not even a beautiful dream, and why
he deprecates the abolition of War in a fear, which is mani-
festly genuine, lest the realization of the pacifist’s dream may

simply plunge our neo-pagan world back again into a spiritual
vacuum.
In fact, we may be driven to admit that von Moltke is right
in taking this stand if he is right in his underlying assumption
that modern Western Man is confined to a choice between two,
and only two, alternatives. If we have really lost the power or
the will to practise the virtues of Gethsemane, then it is cer¬
tainly better to practise those of Sparta or Valhalla than to
practise none at all. And in a ci-devant Christian society this
conclusion is no longer academic; for, in turning our condi¬
tional clause into the simple indicative, von Moltke is now be¬
ing followed by the masses; and his disciples in our generation
can claim, without fear of contradiction, that they have the
big battalions on their side. The latter-day Western cult of ‘the
military virtues’ as the Ten Commandments of a Totalitarian
Parochial State is fast becoming the prevalent religion of the
age; and this faith, archaistically barbaric though it be, will
never be overcome by the Mephistophelian spirit of sheer
negation against which it is itself a victorious protest. Societies
are apt to get the religions, as well as the governments, that
they deserve; and, if we have become unworthy of our Chris¬
tian birthright, then we have condemned ourselves to worship
the resuscitated ghost of an Odin or an Ares. This barbaric
faith is better than none at all; in the deaths of a Leonidas and
TrVggvason the heroism which Militarism inculcates
has risen to the height of sublimity; but this is not the sublimity
of the saints, and not a heroism which leads anywhere except
to suicide. Witness the fates of the abortive Scandinavian Civi-
lzation and the arrested Spartan Civilization. And such will
likewise be the fate of our Western Civilization if von Moltke
is right in his underlying assumption of fact, as well as in his
moral deduction from it. It remains to be seen whether this
assumption is correct, or whether on the other hand Christian¬

ity, so far from being out of the running, has still the power
to release the soul of Homo Occidentalis from the grip of a
hideous and destructive paganism by offering him, once more,
a higher positive alternative. Can Hildebrand arise again in his
might to heal the wounds inflicted upon the souls of his flock
by the sins of a Rodrigo Borgia and a Sinibaldo Fieschi? This
is the greatest of all the questions that have to be answered in
our Western World in this twentieth century.
In following the clue that has been given us by von Moltke,
and examining the hold which the worship of ‘the military
virtues’ has been reacquiring over our Western souls in these
latter days, we may find that we have made some progress to¬
wards solving our problem of whether the institution of War
is intrinsically and irredeemably evil in itself. We have discov¬
ered, in effect, that the problem has been wrongly propounded.
Perhaps the truth is that no created thing can ever be evil in¬
trinsically and irredeemably, because no created thing is in¬
capable of serving as a vehicle for the virtues that flow from
the Creator. ‘The military virtues’ are virtues none the less for
being jewels set in blood and iron; but the value lies in the
jewels themselves and not in their horrible setting; and it is
flying in the face of all experience to jump to the conclusion
that the only place where we can ever hope to find these pre¬
cious things is the slaughterhouse where they have happened
to make their first epiphany to human eyes. The diamond that
is secreted in the clay does not remain there, but finds a fitter
setting in the crown of a king; and when once the diamond-
mine has yielded up its treasure it ceases to be anything but a
death-trap for the miner who cannot now tear himself away
from the scene of his habitual toil and his accidental trove.
What is true of the dross in which the diamond has lain buried
is likewise true of the ephemeral institution of War in which
an eternal principle of goodness has glimmered darkly for a

season, in the guise of ‘the military virtues,’ in order that it may
shine out brightly hereafter in the perfect physical peace of
the City of God. It is the divine virtue—unchanging in itself,
but always changing its temporal abode-that casts the reflec¬
tion of its own inner light upon each of its successive dwelling-
places; and each of these dwelling-places assumes a derelict
ugliness as soon as the temporarily indwelling spirit has ceased
to lighten its darkness.
There is hardly any occurrence or phenomenon about which we

need always be of the same mind if we trace it back through the
ages. That is, no evil was originally an evil, but only became so . . .
Many . instances of things originally good, but which have out-
hved their purpose, could be quoted; and among them perhaps we
might include War. Like everything which has life, War never
remains stationary, but is always developing. Animals did not wage
war, but human beings did, and our descendants—the ‘supermen,’
as Goethe and Nietzsche call them—will cease to do so The
[institution of] War, with which history has acquainted us was
once bom; it was young and now is old. But, just as the love’ of a
maid seems to us lovely and that of an old woman repulsive, even
so it is with War: we cannot and must not judge alike two things
which from their very nature and meaning are wholly different.
Ihere is nothing whatever in common between Achilles’ eternal
bong of Hate and Lissauer’s Hymn of Hate to England; and simi-
arly there is the profoundest difference between the battles in the
Scamander Valley and the fighting between the Meuse and the
Moselle.3
If we have persisted in the worship of War when the good¬

ness which once found a genuine though inadequate expression
in the military virtues’ has been given an incomparably higher
sphere for its exercise in the Christian life, then we have been
guilty of that idolization of an ephemeral institution which is
3 Nicolai, G. F.: The Biology of War, English translation, pp. 4,0-21.
one form of the nemesis of creativity. And our sin is aggra¬

vated if, after centuries spent in attempting the impossible feat
of serving two masters, we have latterly held to the lower and
despised the higher—relapsing altogether into the service of
Odin and Ares, and repudiating even that half-hearted service
which was rendered to Christ by our forebears. This last state
of paganism is vastly worse than the first; for the deliberate
and self-conscious perversity of von Moltke’s and Mussolini’s
archaistic Militarism is as different from the innocently ar¬
chaic ‘military virtues’ of the Chevalier Bayard and Colonel
Newcome as the dusk of evening is different from the gleam
of dawn. The innocence which the Colonel inherited from the
Chevalier can never be recaptured in our Western World by
the heirs of Frederick’s and Napoleon’s cynicism. Colonel
Newcome’s own author was well aware, when he created this
lovable character in the middle of the nineteenth century, that
his creature’s charm and tragedy both owed something to the
fact of his being already an anachronism. The devotees of a
Mussolinian Mars Redivivus will not be Newcomes or Bayards;
they will be Robots and Martians. This process of perversion,
which is the Dead Sea fruit of an Idolatry mated with Archa¬
ism, is the exact reverse of that process of etherialization, and
that progressive transference of the field of action from the
Macrocosm to the Microcosm, in which we may find a cri¬
terion of growth. If this criterion is the true one, it informs
us a priori that the institution of War cannot be morally static.
Granting that this gruesome institution has provided a field
for the exercise of ‘the military virtues’ yesterday, we may be
sure that to-morrow the ‘chivalrous’ kind of War will either
rankle into a Militarism without a vestige of virtue or beauty
or else will be transfigured into a militia Christi in which the
physical warfare of one man against another will have been
translated into a spiritual warfare of all men united in the serv¬

ice of God against the powers of evil.
If our present apostasy proves only to be the last convulsion
of a paganism in articulo mortis, and if this supreme crisis in
the long-drawn-out struggle between paganism and Christian¬
ity is to end in paganism being driven completely off the field,
we may dream of an age to come in which Physical War will
have passed out of our life and faded out of our memory until
the very word ‘war’ loses currency-as the kindred word ‘sac¬
rifice has lost it already—except in a meaning which was origi¬
nally a metaphor. In those days, when men speak of ‘war,’
they will be referring to the war of the spirit; and, if they are
ever reminded of the physical warfare which was the constant
scourge of their predecessors for some six or seven thousand
years, they will think of it in the category of one of those
cruel initiation rites to which Homo Catechumenus used to
submit himself in order to win his way at last into a Com¬
munion of Saints in which the theatre of War has been trans¬
ferred from an outward to an inward battle-field. The warfare
of that perfect Respublica Christiana has been depicted with
a poetic wealth of military imagery, and has been described
with the prophetic vision of sainthood, by one of its citizens
who came to proclaim the advent of the Civitas Dei many hun¬
dreds or thousands of years in advance. Saint Paul was deliver¬
ing his message to the citizens of the war-stricken cities of a
Hellenic universal state in an age of Hellenic history when the
gleam of ‘the military virtues’ could still catch and captivate
the eye from beneath the tarnish deposited by the Militarism
o a ime of Troubles’; and the Apostle seizes upon all the
noble and glorious connotations of War that still survive in his
converts’ minds in order to convey to them, in a chain of mili-
tary metaphors, the more etherial glory and nobility of the
Though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh (for
the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through
God to the pulling down of strong holds): casting down imagina¬
tions, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowl¬
edge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obe¬
dience of Christ.
CHAPTER III
,
Sparta the Military State
When Plato conceived his Utopia, he was inspired by the ac¬

tual institutions of the Spartan city-state: a Hellenic commu¬
nity which was the greatest among the Great Powers of the
Hellenic World in Plato s day. When we look into the origins
of the Spartan system, we find that the Spartans were con¬
fronted with the necessity of performing their tour de force,
and equipping themselves for the task with their ‘peculiar in¬
stitution, because, at an earlier stage in the course of their his¬
tory, they had taken a peculiar turning. The Spartans parted
company, at a certain point in their history, from the common
run of Hellenic city-state communities.
The Spartans made a peculiar response to the common chal¬
lenge which was presented to all Hellenic communities in the
eighth century b.c., when, in consequence of the immediately
antecedent course of Hellenic social development, the exten¬
sion of the area under cultivation in the homelands of the Hel¬
lenic Society in Peninsular Greece and in the Archipelago had
begun to bring in diminishing returns while the population of
Hellas was rapidly increasing in numbers. The ‘normal’ solution
which was found for this common problem of eighth-century
Hellenic life was the further extension of the total arable area in
Hellenic hands by the discovery and conquest of new terri¬
tories overseas. In the galaxy of new Hellenic city-states that
SPARTA, THE MILITARY STATE
27
came into existence as a result of this general movement of

overseas expansion, there was one foundation, Tarentum, which
claimed a Spartan origin; but, even if this claim was in accord¬
ance with historical fact, the case of Tarentum was unique.
Tarentum was the only Hellenic city overseas which even pur¬
ported to be a Spartan colony; and this Tarentine tradition
merely points the truth that, in the main, the Spartans sought
to solve the common eighth-century Hellenic population-prob¬
lem, not along the common lines of overseas colonization, but
in their own peculiar way.
When the Spartans found even their broad and fertile plough¬
lands in the vale of the Eurotas too narrow for a growing
population, they did not turn their eyes to the sea, like the
Chalcidians or Corinthians or Megarians. The sea is not visible
either from Sparta city or from any point on the Spartan plain
or even from the heights that immediately surround it. The
natural feature which dominates the Spartan landscape is the
towering mountain-range of Taygetus, which rises so sheer
from the western edge of the plain that its face seems almost
perpendicular, while its line is so straight and so continuous
that it gives the impression of a wall. This wall-like aspect of
Taygetus attracts the eye to the Langadha: a gorge which
cleaves the range at right angles as though the titanic architect
of plain and mountain had expressly designed this one apparent
break in an otherwise uniformly impassable barrier in order to
provide his people with a sally-port. When the Spartans began,
in the eighth century b.c., to feel the pinch of population-
pressure, they lifted up their eyes unto the hills and beheld the
Langadha and sought their help in the pass through the moun¬
tains, as their neighbours, under the same spur of Necessity,
were seeking theirs in the passage over the sea. At this first
parting of the ways, help did come to the Spartans from the
lord Apollo of Amyclae and the lady Athana of the Brazen
House. The First Messeno-Spartan War (circa 736-720 b.c.),

which was contemporary with the first Hellenic settlements
on the Thracian and Sicilian coasts, left the Spartan victors in
possession of broader conquered lands in Hellas than the Chal-
cidian colonists won overseas at Leontini or the Spartans’ own
reputed colonists at Tarentum. But the Presiding Genius of
Sparta, who led her and who did ‘not suffer’ her ‘foot to be
moved’ when once she had reached her Messenian goal, did not
thereby ‘preserve’ her ‘from all evil.’ On the contrary, the
superhuman—or inhuman—fixity of Sparta’s subsequent pos¬
ture, like the mythical doom of Lot’s wife, was manifestly a
curse and not a blessing.
The Spartans’ peculiar troubles began as soon as the First
Messeno-Spartan War had ended in a Spartan victory; for to
conquer the Messenians in war was a less difficult task for the
Spartans than to hold them down in peace-time. These con¬
quered Messenians were no barbarous Thracians or Sikels, but
Hellenes of like culture, and like passions, with the Spartans
themselves: all but their equals in war and perhaps more than
their equals in numbers. The First Messeno-Spartan War (circa
736-72° b.c.) was child’s-play compared to the Second (circa
650-620 b.c.), in which the subject Messenians—tempered by
adversity and filled with shame and rage at having submitted
to a fate by which no other Hellenes had allowed themselves
to be overtaken—now rose in arms against their Spartan rulers
and fought far harder and longer, in this second bout, to re¬
cover their freedom than they had fought in the first bout to
preserve it. Their tardy heroism failed, in the end, to avert a
second Spartan victory; and, after this unprecedentedly stub¬
born and exhausting war, the victors treated the vanquished
with unprecedented severity. Yet, in the long view of the
Gods, the Messenian insurgents had secured their revenge on
Sparta, in the sense in which Hannibal was to have his revenge
SPARTA, THE MILITARY STATE 29
on Rome. The Second Messeno-Spartan War changed the

whole rhythm of Spartan life and deflected the whole course
of Spartan history. It was one of those wars in which the iron
enters into the survivors’ souls. It was so terrible an experience
that it left Spartan life fast bound in misery and iron, and it
‘side-tracked’ Spartan evolution into a blind alley. And since
the Spartans were never able to forget what they had gone
through, they were never able to relax, and therefore never
able to extricate themselves from the impasse of their post-war
reaction.
The relations of the Spartans with their human environment
in Messenia passed through the same ironic vicissitudes as the
relations of the Esquimaux with their physical environment in
the Arctic Zone. In either case we have the spectacle of a com¬
munity which ventures to grapple with an environment that
daunts this community’s neighbours, in order to wring from
this excessively formidable enterprise an exceptionally rich re¬
ward. In the first phase, this act of audacity seems to be jus¬
tified by results. The Esquimaux find better hunting on the
Arctic ice than their less adventurous Indian cousins can find
on the North American prairies; the Spartans, in the First Mes¬
seno-Spartan War, win richer lands from their fellow-Hellenes
across the mountains than the contemporary Chalcidian colo¬
nists can win from barbarians across the sea. But in the next
phase the original—and irrevocable—act of audacity brings its
ineluctable penalty. The conquered environment now takes its
audacious conqueror captive. The Esquimaux become prison¬
ers of the Arctic climate and have to shape their lives accord¬
ing to its exacting dictates down to the smallest detail. The
Spartans, having conquered Messenia in the First War in order
to live unto themselves, are constrained, in the Second War
and ever after, to give up their lives to the task of keeping
Messenia. They live as the obedient humble servants of their
own dominion over Messenia from this time forth for ever¬
more.
The Spartans equipped themselves for performing their tour
de force by adapting existing institutions to fulfil new needs.
The way ... in which those primitive institutions, which other¬

wise vanished in all Greek communities before the face of the ris-
ing [Hellenic] culture, were made to serve as the corner-stones of
the Spartan organism, is something which exacts from us the deep¬
est admiration.
In this adaptation, one cannot refuse to discern something which
is more than the mere result of an automatic development. The
methodical and purposeful way in which everything has been made
to lead towards one single goal forces us to see here the interven¬
tion of a consciously shaping hand . . . The existence of one man,
or of several men working in the same direction, who have remod¬
elled the primitive institutions into the Agoge and the Kosmos, is
a necessary hypothesis.1
Hellenic tradition attributed not only the reconstruction of

the Lacedaemonian Society after the Second Messeno-Spartan
War a reconstruction which made Sparta what she was and
what she remained ever after until she collapsed-but also all
the antecedent and less abnormal events in Spartan social and
political history to ‘Lycurgus.’ But ‘Lycurgus’ was a god; and
modern Western scholars, in search for a human author of the
‘Lycurgean’ system, have been inclined to find their man in
Chilon, a Spartan Overseer who left a reputation as a sage and
who appears to have held office about 550 b.c. Perhaps we shall
not go far wrong if we regard the ‘Lycurgean’ system as the
cumulative work of a series of Spartan statesmen during some¬
thing like a century, dating from the outbreak of the Second
Messeno-Spartan War.
1 Nilsson, M. P.: ‘Die Grundlagen des Spartanischen Lebens,’ in Klio

vol. xn, p. 308. ’
In the Spartan system the outstanding feature—the feature

which accounts alike for the system’s astonishing efficiency
and for its fatal rigidity and for its consequent breakdown—
was its ‘grand disregard for human nature.’ Virtually the whole
burden of maintaining the Spartan dominion over Messenia was
imposed on the free-born children of free-born Spartiates. At
the same time, within the Spartiate citizen-body itself, the prin¬
ciple of equality was not only well-established but was carried
to great lengths.
Though there was not an equalization of wealth, every Spar¬
tiate ‘Peer’ held from the State one of the fiefs or allotments
of equal magnitude—or equal productivity—into which the
arable land of Messenia had been divided up after the Second
Messeno-Spartan War; and each of these allotments, which
was cultivated by the labour of Messenians bound to the soil
as serfs, was calculated to support a Spartiate Peer and his
family, on a ‘spartanly’ frugal standard of living, without their
having to labour with their own hands. Accordingly, every
Spartiate ‘Peer,’ however poor, was economically in a position
to devote his whole time and energy to the art of war; and
since permanent and perpetual military training and service
were also incumbent upon every Spartiate ‘Peer,’ however rich
he might be, the residual inequality of wealth was not, at
Sparta, reflected in any substantial difference between the rich
man’s and the poor man’s way of life.
In the matter of hereditary rank, the Spartan nobility appear
to have retained no political privilege denied to commoners
except eligibility to the Council of State. For the rest, they
were absorbed into the rank and file of the ‘Peers’; and, in par¬
ticular, the three hundred knights of Sparta were no longer,
under the ‘Lycurgean’ system, either a club of nobles or a
mounted force. They had become a corps (Telite of heavy in¬
fantrymen which was recruited by merit from all the ‘Peers,
32
who competed eagerly for admission. The most striking mani¬

festation of the equalitarian spirit of the ‘Lycurgean’ system
was the status to which it reduced the Kings. Though the
Kings continued to succeed to the throne by hereditary right,
the one substantial power which they retained was the mili¬
tary command on active service. Otherwise, apart from cer¬
tain ceremonial duties and privileges which were less important
than picturesque, the reigning Kings, as well as all other mem¬
bers of the two royal families, had to submit to the same exact¬
ing and life-long discipline as ordinary ‘Peers.’ As heirs appar¬
ent, they received the same education; and their succession to
the throne brought them no exemption.
Thus, within the fraternity of the Spartiate ‘Peers,’ differ¬
ences of birth and of hereditary privilege counted, under the
‘Lycurgean’ system, for little or nothing; and, although one
normal qualification for admission into this fraternity was free
Spartiate birth, no candidates for admission would ever have
dreamt of saying—even within themselves, let alone in public
—the Spartan equivalent of ‘We have Abraham to our father’;
for Spartiate birth was no guarantee of promotion to the cov¬
eted though onerous status of a ‘Peer.’ Indeed, Spartiate birth,
though normally required, was not a sine qua non. Spartiate
birth simply condemned a child (if it were not reprieved by
being rejected as a weakling after birth and put out to die of
exposure) to undergo the ordeal of a Spartan education; and
this ordeal merely entitled a boy to compete for a place in the
fraternity of the ‘Peers’ when he came of age. A child’s re¬
sponse to this ordeal of education counted for more than his
birth in the last resort. There were Spartiates born who failed
to give satisfaction under the educational test and who were
therefore eventually refused admission to the fraternity of
‘Peers’ and were left to weep and gnash their teeth in outer
darkness in the unenviable status of ‘Inferiors.’ Conversely,
there were cases—though these were evidently rare—in which
non-Spartiate boys were allowed to undergo the Spartan edu¬
cation; and if these ‘Alien Boys’ acquitted themselves well, they
appear to have been no less eligible for enrolment among the
‘Peers’ than their Spartiate class-mates.
To this extent the Spartan system ignored the claims of birth
and heredity, and the God Lycurgus went still farther in de¬
fiance of ‘human nature.’ The Spartan social reformer ventured
to interfere with marriage itself in the interests of eugenics,
and sought to do what he could to obtain the kind of human
material that he wanted, by breeding, before the time came
for selection. The Spartan conscription, for the class that was
subject to it (that is to say, for all free-born Spartiates who
had not been exposed after birth), was universal. The Spartans
took the children from their homes and put them into the edu¬
cational mill at the age of seven. Finally, the Spartans not only
conscripted and trained girls as well as boys, but they went
far towards an identical treatment of both sexes. For Spartan
girls, as well as for Spartan boys, conscription was universal;
and the Spartan girls were not trained in special female accom¬
plishments, nor kept in seclusion from the men. Spartan girls,
like Spartan boys, were trained on a competitive system in
athletics; and girls, like boys, competed naked in public before
a male audience.
In the matter of breeding human stock, the Spartan system
pursued two distinct aims simultaneously. It aimed both at
quantity and at quality. It secured quantity (proportionately
to the miniature scale on which the Spartan Society was built)
by addressing itself to the individual male adult Spartiate and
seeking to influence his behaviour through inducements and
through penalties. The deliberate and confirmed bachelor was
penalized by the State and was insulted by his juniors for his
shameful lack of public spirit. On the other hand, the father
i
of three sons was exempt from mobilization, and the father of

four from all obligations towards the State. At the same time,
quality was secured by keeping alive, with a conscious and
definite eugenic purpose, certain primitive social customs gov¬
erning sexual intercourse which appear to have been relics of
a sex-group system of social organization antecedent to the
system represented by marriage and the family. A Spartiate
husband won popular approval, instead of exposing himself to
public condemnation, if he took pains to improve the quality
of his wife’s progeny by arranging that her children should
be gotten upon her by a sire who was a better man—or human
animal—than her husband himself. And it even appears that a
Spartiate wife could arrange this on her own account with im¬
punity if her husband would not take the initiative in provid¬
ing her with a substitute for himself when he was manifestly
below par. The spirit in which the Spartans practised their
eugenics is conveyed by Plutarch in a passage in which he says
the Spartan social reformer
saw nothing but vulgarity and vanity in the sexual conventions of

the rest of Mankind, who take care to serve their bitches and their
mares with the best sires that they can manage to borrow or hire,
yet lock their women up and keep them under watch and ward in
order to make sure that they shall bear children exclusively to their
husbands-as though this were a husband’s sacred right even if he
happens to be feebleminded or senile or diseased. This convention
ignores the two obvious truths that bad parents produce bad chil-
dred and good parents good children, and that the first people to
feel the difference will be those who possess the children and who
have to bring them up.
In the matter of educating the Spartiate children which had

been bred in this way, with the ultimate object of selecting the
best of them for enrolment among the ‘Peers’ and endowment
with public allotments, the Spartan system again availed itself
of the relics of a pre-familial system of social organization in
which the child who no longer needed his mother’s personal
care was educated, not by learning his father’s business in a
patriarchal household, but by successive membership in a series
of ‘human packs,’ in which he consorted, at each stage, with
the other children of the tribe who were of his own age and
sex. The ‘Lycurgean’ reform adopted this ‘age-class’ system
and at the same time adapted it to its own educational purpose
by introducing a cross-division in which children of all ages
were brought together in one group, so that the elder children
might assist in training the younger. These juvenile ‘droves’
were reproductions of, and preparations for, the adult ‘messes,’
which were associations of ‘Peers’ belonging to different ‘age-
classes,’ from the highest to the lowest, among the forty ‘year-
classes’ (from the twenty-first to the sixtieth year inclusive)
that were subject to military service. The climax of a Spartan
boy’s thirteen years of education in a ‘drove’ was his candida¬
ture, at the end of his twentieth year, for entry into one of
the ‘messes,’ which was the sole avenue of admission into the
fraternity of the ‘Peers.’ Entry into a ‘mess’ could only be
secured by co-option; and a single ‘black ball’ entailed the re¬
jection of the candidate. A successful candidate, once co-opted,
remained an active member of his ‘mess’ for forty years unless
he either failed to make his prescribed contribution, in victuals
and money, towards the upkeep of the common table or
were convicted of the unpardonable offence of cowardice
in war.
The leading features in the Spartan system were: supervision,
selection, and specialization; a competitive spirit; and the simul¬
taneous use of the negative stimulus of punishment and the
positive stimulus of reward. And in the Spartiate fraternity of
‘Peers’ these features were not confined to the educational
stage. They continued to dominate the Spartiate’s adult life as
they had dominated his boyhood; and from the moment when
he was taken away from his mother upon the completion of
his seventh year he was continuously subject to discipline until
the completion of his sixtieth year brought him his release from
military service. The outward and visible sign of this discipline
was the regulation which prescribed fifty-three years ‘service
with the colours’; for the Spartiate who had been transferred
as a child from his parents’ home to a juvenile ‘drove’ did not
find himself at liberty to live in a home of his own when he
had been co-opted into* a ‘mess’ and had been endowed with a
public allotment and had performed his social duty of taking
a wife in marriage. The Spartiate ‘Peers’ were both compelled
to marry and forbidden to lead a ‘home life.’ The Spartiate
bridegroom was required to spend even his wedding-night in
barracks; and, though the ban upon sleeping at home was grad¬
ually relaxed as he advanced in years, the ban upon dining at
home was absolute and permanent.
Lycurgus took care that the Spartiates should not be at liberty to

take a preliminary dinner at home and so come to mess on full
stomachs. If a Spartiate showed no appetite at mess, he was ‘told
off’ by his messmates as a glutton who was too soft to stand the
common fare; and if he was actually convicted he was fined. There
was a famous occasion when King Agis had returned from the wars
after a long absence (at the end of his victorious war of attrition
against Athens). The King wanted to dine, just once, with his wife,
and sent to the mess for his portion; but the Army Council would
not allow it to be sent, and, when the incident came to the notice
of the Board of Overseers next day, they made the King pay a
fine.2 r J
Manifestly, a system which set ‘human nature’ at defiance

so truculently as this could not have been enforced without
some overwhelming external sanction; and at Sparta this sanc-
2 Plutarch: Apophthegmata Laconica: Lycurgus, No. 6.
tion was applied by public opinion, which knew how to chas¬
tise an offender against the Spartan social code with scorpions
that stung far more cruelly than the Overseers’ whips. The
point is brought out by an Athenian observer3 who studied
the Spartan system in its eleventh hour, on the eve of its col¬
lapse.
One of the remarkable achievements of Lycurgus is that he has

made it preferable, in Sparta, to die a noble death rather than re¬
main alive in disgrace. As a matter of fact, investigation reveals that
there are actually fewer deaths in battle among the Spartans than
in armies which give way to fear and prefer to leave the field; so
that in reality courage turns out to be a more effective survival-
factor than cowardice. The path of courage is easier and more
agreeable and smoother and more secure . . . And I ought not to
omit to explain how Lycurgus made sure that this path should be
followed by his Spartans. He made sure of that by ensuring inevi¬
table happiness for the brave and inevitable unhappiness for the
cowardly. In other communities, a coward’s only penalty is to be
branded with the epithet. For the rest, he is free to work and play
cheek by jowl with men of valour if he chooses. In Sparta, on the
other hand, everybody would be ashamed to take a coward for his
messmate or to take him for his partner in athletics. And it will
often happen that when they are picking up ball-teams the coward
finds himself left out, and that in choirs he is pushed out into the
least honourable positions, and that he has to yield precedence to
everybody in the street and at table and to make way for his jun¬
iors and to keep his womenfolk indoors and to bear their re¬
proaches for his lack of manhood and to resign himself to having
no housewife in his house and to pay a fine on that account into the
bargain, and never to show himself out of doors with his skin oiled,
and in fact to do nothing whatsoever that is done by Spartans who
have no stain on their reputations—under pain of receiving bodily
chastisement from his betters. For my part, I am not at all surprised
that, in a community in which cowardice is visited with this ter¬
rific penalization, death is preferable to a life of such reproach and
such dishonour.
3 Xenophon: Respublica Lacedaemoniorum, ch. ix.
Yet penalization alone, however merciless, could never have

created the Spartan ethos or have inspired the superhuman
heroism which that ethos made possible. The sanction which
made the Spartans what they were was internal as well as
external; for these implacable souls, whose corporate public
opinion made life intolerable for any one of their number who
had failed to live up to their common standard of behaviour,
were merciless in such cases just because they were single-
hearted in exacting the same standard individually from them¬
selves. This ‘categorical imperative,’ in the soul of every true
Spartiate ‘Peer,’ was the ultimate driving force which made
the ‘Lycurgean’ system work-in sheer defiance of ‘human na¬
ture’—for more than two hundred years. And its essence is
laid bare in the no doubt imaginary but none the less illuminat¬
ing conversation which Herodotus puts into the mouths of the
Achaemenian Padishah Xerxes and the exiled Spartan King
Damaratus, who was serving on Xerxes’ staff, when Xerxes’ army
was marching upon Thermopylae from the Dardanelles. Xerxes
has asked Damaratus whether he is to expect any resistance;
and Damaratus has answered him that, whatever the other
Hellenes may do, he can guarantee in regard to his own Spartan
countrymen (though he personally has no cause to love them)
that they will turn out to fight without taking any account of
the disparity of numbers. When Xerxes refuses to entertain
the idea that troops who are free agents, as the Spartans are
ex hypothesis would voluntarily face an ordeal into which
Xerxes’ own troops could only be driven by dread of their
commander and by compulsion of the lash, Damaratus replies
that,
free though the Spartans are, they are not free altogether. They
too serve a master in the shape of Law, whom they dread far more
intensely than your servants dread you. They show this by doing
whatever their master orders, and his orders are always the same:
‘In action it is forbidden to retire in the face of enemy forces of
whatever strength. Troops are to keep their formation and to con¬
quer or die.’
This was the spirit that inspired the Spartans’ achievements;

and those achievements have stamped the Spartan name with
the meaning which it still bears in every living language to-day.
The deeds are so famous that there is no need in this place to
retell familiar tales. The story of Leonidas and the Three Hun¬
dred at Thermopylae: is it not written in the Seventh Book
of Herodotus? And the story of the Boy and the Fox: is it
not written in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus? And do not these
two stories, between them, convey the whole tour de force
of Spartan boyhood and Spartan manhood? And if we cannot
take our eyes off the Spartans—as, in candour, we cannot—
without first looking also at the other side of the Spartan shield,
we have simply to remind ourselves that the last two years of
a Spartan boy’s education before his coming of age—the crucial
years upon which, more than any others, his prospects of co¬
option on to a ‘mess’ depended—were probably spent in the
Secret Service, and that this was nothing else than an official
‘murder gang’ which patrolled the Laconian countryside sur¬
reptitiously-taking cover by day and stalking abroad, like a
veritable negotium perambulans in tenebris, by night—for the
purpose of making away with any Helots who had shown
symptoms of restiveness or perhaps merely vestiges of char¬
acter and ability. While Sparta demanded, and duly evoked,
the manly heroism of a Leonidas and his Three Hundred in
order to cover the Spartan name with incomparable military
glory, she equally demanded—and did not fail to evoke—the
juvenile criminality of her Secret Service in order that the tiny
minority of Spartiate ‘Peers’ might keep their feet on the necks
of a numerically overwhelming majority of ‘Inferiors’ and
‘Dependants’ and ‘New Members’ and ‘Serfs who would have
been delighted, if ever they had the chance, ‘to eat’ their hand¬
ful of. masters ‘alive.’ If, under the ‘Lycurgean’ system, the
Spartans rose to some of the sublimest heights of human con¬
duct, they also sounded some of the darkest depths.
Every feature in the ‘Lycurgean’ system—material or spirit¬
ual, evil or good—was directed towards one single aim; and
this definite aim was exactly achieved. Under the ‘Lycurgean’
system, the Lacedaemonian heavy infantry were the best heavy
infantry in the Hellenic World. They were far superior to any
other Hellenic troops of the same arm. For nearly two cen¬
turies the armies of other Hellenic Powers dreaded to meet
the Lacedaemonian Army in pitched battle. In drill and in
morale alike, the Lacedaemonians were inimitable. But, just be¬
cause of this, there was no room, in ‘Lycurgean’ Sparta, for
more than one kind of professionalism.
The ‘single-track’ genius of the ‘Lycurgean’ agoge leaps to
the eye of any visitor to the present-day Sparta Museum. For
this museum is totally unlike any other modern collection of
extant Hellenic works of art, either in Greece or elsewhere.
In other such collections the visitor’s eye seeks out and finds
and dwells upon the works of ‘the Classical Age,’ which ap¬
proximately coincides with the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.
In the Sparta Museum, however, this ‘Classical’ Hellenic art is
conspicuous by its absence. The visitor’s eye is here caught
first, and fascinated, by the ‘pre-classical’ exhibits: delicate
ivory-carving and striking polychrome pottery painted by
artists who had a gift for line as well as colour. Fragmentary
though they are, these relics of early Spartan art bear unmis¬
takable marks of originality and individuality; and the visitor
who has made the discovery of them here for the first time
looks expectantly to find the sequel-only to look in vain, since
this early blossoming of Spartan art remains a promise without
a fulfilment. In the place which should contain the monuments
41
of a Spartan version of ‘Classical’ art there is a great hiatus;
and the Sparta Museum contains little more except a super¬
fluity of uninspired and standardized works of minor sculpture
dating from the late Hellenistic and early Imperial period.
Between the two sets of exhibits in the Sparta Museum a great
chronological gulf is fixed; and this gulf is explained by the
dates. The date at which the early Spartan art breaks off is
approximately that of the Overseership of Chilon in the middle
of the sixth century b.c. The almost equally abrupt resumption
of ‘artistic production’ in the age of decadence is posterior to
189-188 b.c.: the date at which the ‘Lycurgean’ system is
known to have been abolished at Sparta by the deliberate pol¬
icy of a foreign conqueror after Sparta had been forcibly in¬
corporated into the Achaean League. Art was impossible at
Sparta so long as Spartan life was confined, by this cast-iron
system, to the single track of militarism.
The paralysis which descended, with the agoge, upon Spar¬
tan pictorial and glyptic art was equally fatal to the art of
music, in which the Spartans had likewise shown early prom¬
ise. The Spartan authorities even discouraged their nationals
from cultivating an art which is so near akin to the soldier’s
that, in our modern Western World, it is regarded as the best
preparation for a military training. The Spartans were prohib¬
ited from competing in the great Pan-Hellenic athletic sports,
on the ground that professionalism in running and jumping
and putting the weight was one thing and professionalism in
wielding the spear and the shield and performing the evolu¬
tions of the parade-ground was something quite different,
from which the Spartiate’s heart and mind must not be dis¬
tracted on any account.
Thus Sparta paid the penalty for having taken her own head¬
strong and hazardous course at the parting of the ways in the
eighth century b.c. by condemning herself, in the sixth cen-
tury, to standing still—with arms presented like a soldier on

parade—at a moment when other Hellenes were just moving
forward once again on one of the most signal moves in the
whole course of Hellenic history.
It requires an effort of imagination to remind ourselves that
the fraternity of Spartiate ‘Peers’ was the earliest Hellenic de¬
mocracy, and that the redivision of the arable land of Messenia
among the members of this Spartiate demos in equal allotments
became the watchword of the revolution that convulsed Athens
in the next generation. In Sparta the new movement which had
declared itself precociously in the ‘Lycurgean’ reform was
doomed to be arrested prematurely at a rudimentary stage be¬
cause the ‘Lycurgean’ system changed the face of Spartan life,
only to petrify it for ever after. It was not in Sparta, and not
in response to the peculiar challenge that had been presented
to the Spartans in the Second Messeno-Spartan War, that these
new tendencies in Hellenic life were destined to work them¬
selves out in fresh acts of creation. The creative act of the
sixth century b.c. was evoked by a challenge of a different
kind; and this challenge was presented in the first instance to
those Hellenic communities which had responded to the pre¬
vious challenge of the eighth century, not on the Spartan lines
of conquering a next-door neighbour in Hellas, but on the
Chalcidian and Megarian lines of overseas colonization.
After the Malthusian problem had been solved—or shelved-
in Hellas at large by this method for a period of some two
centuries, it was raised again, and this time more acutely than
before, by the simultaneous stoppage of the territorial expan¬
sion of the Hellenic World in every quarter. Eastward, Hel¬
lenic expansion was checked in the sixth century b.c. by the
rise of new Great Powers-the Sa'ite Power in Egypt and the
Lydian in Anatolia and the far mightier Achaemenian Empire
that first overshadowed and then absorbed them both. During
43
the same century, Hellenic expansion was brought to a halt
in the Western Mediterranean by a rally among the rival Lev¬
antine colonial peoples—Phoenicians and Etruscans—who now
discovered in political co-operation a make-weight for their
inferiority to the Greeks in vitality and numbers. At the same
time the indigenous barbarians of the West were beginning to
learn how to hold their own against all the Levantine intruders
alike by fighting them with their own weapons. In these various
ways the expansion of Hellas was cut short all round; and this
challenge stimulated the Hellenes to solve their recurrent so¬
cial problem by substituting, for the mere extensive growth
which was no longer open to them, an intensive growth, of a
higher social order, which was still within their capacity. They
passed from ‘subsistence farming’ to ‘cash-crop farming’ and
manufactures; from a regime of local self-sufficiency to a re¬
gime of international trade; from a natural economy to a
money economy; and from a polity based on birth to a polity
based on property. And the lead in making this victorious re¬
sponse was taken by Athens: a ‘dark horse’ who had not taken
part in the earlier movement of overseas colonization, but who
at the same time had not followed Sparta into her Messenian
blind-alley.
The nature of the Athenian response has only to be men¬
tioned in order to point the contrast between Hellenic prog¬
ress under Athenian leadership and Sparta’s un-Hellenic im¬
mobility; and this contrast is aptly symbolized in the difference
between the Attic and the Spartan money-coinage. The new
invention of coined money had found its way into Sparta be¬
fore the ‘Lycurgean’ system set hard; and even thereafter it
continued to play a not unimportant part in the internal fife
of the fraternity of Spartiate ‘Peers,’ since a ‘Peer’s’ contribu¬
tion to his ‘mess,’ which he had to keep up under pain of for¬
feiting his membership, was payable partly in money as well
as in kind. Yet although the sixth-century Spartan reformers

could not, or would not, banish coin from Laconia altogether,
they succeeded in adapting this institution to their purpose
like all the other institutions which they found in the field.
They allowed their countrymen to retain a token-currency of
iron which was too heavy and bulky for ordinary convenience
and was chemically treated in such a way as to make it too
poor in quality to have any intrinsic commercial value even in
bulk. Thus Laconia was excluded from the international con¬
tinuum of financial relations, just as effectively as if she had
possessed no coinage at all, by being given a coinage which
could have no currency beyond the Laconian frontiers. Mean¬
while ‘the owls of Athene’ became the current coin of the
entire Mediterranean World, and the occasional arrival of a
flock of these migratory birds in Sparta itself created still
greater consternation among the Spartan authorities than the
importation of a musical instrument with more than seven
strings. The Spartiate Gylippus himself, who had done perhaps
as much as any other single man to bring Athens to the ground
in the Great War of 431-404 b.c. by foiling the Athenian at¬
tempt to conquer Sicily, was forced to go into exile on the
morrow of the peace when his servant laid information that
there was ‘a bevy of owls in the tilery.’
Thus the ‘Lycurgean’ system, which the Spartans established
in order to defend their dominion over the Helots at home,
had the effect of throwing them on the defensive against the
whole Hellenic World into the bargain. And the greatest irony
in Sparta’s situation was the fact that, when she had sacrificed
everything that made life worth living to the single object of
forging an irresistible military instrument, she found that she
dared not make use of her dearly bought power because her
social equilibrium under the ‘Lycurgean’ system was so exact,
and her social tension so high, that the slightest disturbance of
the status quo might have disastrous repercussions; and this
disaster might be brought on by a victory which would in¬
crease the permanent demands on Sparta’s man-power almost
as readily as by a defeat which would open the way for an
invasion of Sparta’s home-territories. In the event, the fatal
victory of 404 b.c. and the consequent fatal defeat of the year
371 duly brought upon the Spartans the disaster which they
had never ceased to dread since they had succeeded in making
themselves into the most formidable military power in their
world. Yet Spartan statesmanship managed to postpone the evil
day for nearly two centuries, dating from the completion of
the ‘Lycurgean’ reforms, by declining to accept for Sparta the
greatness which circumstances incessantly sought to thrust
upon her.
In this frame of mind the Spartans evaded, time and again,
the challenge to assume the leadership of Hellas which the
Achaemenian peril presented to them. They forbore to send
help to the Anatolian Greek insurgents in 499 b.c.; they arrived
too late to fight at Marathon in 490; and, after covering them¬
selves with glory, under protest, at Thermopylae and Plataea,
they abdicated from the high command of the forces of libera¬
tion in 479-478. Rather than incur the risks which greatness
involved for Sparta, they deliberately left their own repudiated
greatness lying derelict for Athens to appropriate; and yet,
even at this bitter price, they were ultimately unable to elude
their tragic destiny. For the Spartans’ great refusal to accept
the challenge of 499-479 b.c. did not, and could not, purchase
for Sparta more than a brief immunity from her peculiar di¬
lemma. In preferring, to the risks of acceptance, the lesser im¬
mediate evil of giving the Athenians their opportunity, the
Spartans were opening the door for the menace to Hellenic
liberties to recur in the shape of an Athenian peril; and this
time the Spartans found themselves confronted with a chal-
lenge which it was impossible for them to ignore. In the opin¬

ion of Thucydides, ‘the fundamental . . . cause of the Atheno-
Peloponnesian War was the fear inspired in the Lacedaemo¬
nians by the rise of Athens to greatness; and this fear compelled
them to take up arms’—under threat of seeing the ‘sanitary
cordon’ of their Peloponnesian alliance dissolve and their Athe¬
nian enemy from beyond the Isthmus join hands, to their un¬
doing, with their Messenian enemy within their gates.
In 431 b.c. Corinthian diplomacy succeeded in compelling
Spartan statesmanship to assume the leadership of Hellas at
last; and, in the Great War of 431-404, the Spartan military
machine—now tested for the first time to the uttermost—per¬
formed all that its makers had intended, and all that Sparta’s
neighbours hoped or feared. The Spartan nightmare of an
union sacree between Athens and the Helots did not come
true—not even when the Athenian strategist Demosthenes made
his brilliant stroke of establishing a fortified post at Pylos, on
the Messenian coast of Laconia, in 425 b.c. On the other hand,
the overland expedition of the Spartan commander Brasidas
to the Thracian seaboard, and the exhaustion of Athenian
strength in Nicias’ naval expedition to Sicily, did bring to pass
the Athenian nightmare that the Peloponnesians might succeed
in joining hands with the Hellenic subjects of Athens on the
other side of the Aegean, and might overpower Athens on her
own element with a fleet manned by Ionian seamen and fi¬
nanced by Achaemenian gold. When this first stage in the
self-inflicted attrition of the Hellenic Society came to an end
in the year 404 b.c., it was Athens and not Sparta that lay pros¬
trate. Yet the Spartan King Agis’ prophecy—uttered at the
moment when the die was cast—that ‘this day’ would prove to
be the beginning of great evils for Hellas’ came true in re¬
spect of the victors no less than the vanquished; for the great¬
ness which Sparta now tardily and involuntarily retrieved from
her prostrated rival proved to be a veritable Shirt of Nessus.

The Spartans were placed in a peculiar predicament by their
victorious war of 431-404 b.c. A people trained consummately
but exclusively for warlike contact with their neighbours found
themselves suddenly compelled, by the outcome of one partic¬
ular war, to enter into non-military relations for which they
were not only unprepared but were positively unfitted by their
own peculiar institutions and habits and ethos. These peculiar¬
ities which the Spartans had developed in order to grapple with
a previous problem, and which had given them superhuman
strength within the limits of the narrow environment within
which their lines had previously been cast, now took their
revenge upon this peculiar people by making them inhumanly
or infra-humanly incompetent to live in the wider world into
which the fortunes of war had eventually carried them. The
very exactness of their adaptation to their previous environ¬
ment made any readaptation to a new environment so difficult
for them as to be virtually impossible; and the very qualities
which had been the secret of their success in the one situation
became their worst enemies when they found themselves in
the other. The Spartans came to grief when, in consequence
of a military victory, they had to take upon their own shoul¬
ders the imperial responsibilities of Athens instead of merely
holding the naval and military power of Athens at bay.
The contrast between the Spartan at home and the Spartan
abroad was a by-word in Hellas; for whereas, on his own
ground, the Spartan admittedly rose above the ordinary Hel¬
lenic standards of personal discipline and disinterestedness, he
fell below those same standards in at least equal measure as
soon as he found himself out of his own element. The spectac¬
ular demoralization of the Spartan Regent Pausanias, when cir¬
cumstances placed him in command of a Pan-Hellenic force
on Achaemenian territory, had been an awful warning which
had counted for much in the Spartan Government’s decision

to abdicate from the leadership of Hellas in 479-478 b.c. And
this decision was almost justified in retrospect when, in and
after the second and conclusive round of the Great War of
431-404 b.c., Sparta was forced to send abroad Pausaniases by
the dozen. ‘We have done those things which we ought not
to have done and we have left undone those things which we
ought to have done, and there is no health in us’ must have
been the reflection that forced itself, on the morrow of Leuctra,
upon the mind of a Spartan statesman like King Agesilaus who
was old enough to remember the ancien regime.
In that year 371 b.c. the majority of the Spartiate ‘Peers’
were serving, outside the frontiers of Laconia, on garrison duty
in other Hellenic states which had once been Sparta’s volun¬
tary allies, but which could no longer be held to their alle¬
giance except by naked military force; and the pick of them
had been seconded from their military duties in order to oc¬
cupy political and administrative posts in which they were
making themselves as notorious, on a petty scale, as Pausanias
himself, for their Spartan tactlessness and tyranny and corrup¬
tion, until the respectable title of ‘moderators,’ by which these
Spartan martinets abroad were called, had come to sound
odious in Hellenic ears. These very Spartiate ‘Peers,’ who were
making the Spartan name stink as foully as fish out of water,
would no doubt have manifested the traditional Spartan virtues
if Fate had allowed them to fulfil the expectations in which
they had grown up by leaving them to live their camp-life on
the banks of the Eurotas until the Lacedaemonian Army was
mobilized for the Leuctra campaign. Unfortunately for their
own reputation and their country’s, all these men were absent
at that grave hour, and, in the Lacedaemonian contingent of
the army under King Cleombrotus’ command which was so
signally defeated by the Thebans at Leuctra in 371 b.c., there
were only 400 Spartiates in action apart from the 300 ‘knights’
who always formed a Spartan King’s personal bodyguard on
active service. This figure seems to mean that, in the Lacedae¬
monian infantry of the line, on this critical occasion, only one
man was a Spartiate in every ten, instead of the four Spartiates
in every ten Lacedaemonians which was the regulation quota.
If the Spartiate quota had not been thus cut down, at Leuctra,
to a quarter of its normal strength, we may doubt whether
even the valour of the Theban infantrymen and the tactical
genius of the Theban commander Epaminondas, who knew
how to turn his troops’ fighting-power to the best account,
would have been able to achieve their historic success of break¬
ing that record of Lacedaemonian invincibility which had re¬
mained unbroken, down to that date, for at least two centuries
and a half.
Moreover, the Spartan victory over Athens in the Great
War of 431-404 b.c. ruined Sparta in other and subtler ways,
besides the compulsion which it put upon her to second her
‘Peers’ from military service, from which they could not safely
be spared, to non-military duties with which they could not
safely be entrusted. It ruined her, for example, by exposing her
belatedly, and therefore disastrously, to the subversive social ef¬
fects of a money economy from which her people had so long
been artificially sheltered. ‘The date at which Lacedaemon was
first attacked by social disease and corruption practically coin¬
cides with the moment at which she overthrew the Athenian
Empire and gorged herself with the precious metals.’4 And the
introduction of a money economy brought in its train an
equally subversive revolution in the Spartan attitude towards
personal property. Spartan conservatism could not, indeed,
bring itself to go the length of allowing real estate to be bought
and sold in the market; but at some date unknown in the
4 Plutarch’s Life of Agis, ch. v.
5°
fourth century b.c. the Spartan Assembly passed into law ‘a
bill making it legal for the holder of a family property or an
allotment to give it away during his lifetime, or to bequeath it
by will, to anybody whom he chose.’ 5 The effect of this piece
of legislation in reducing the numbers of the Spartiate ‘Peers’
must have been much greater than the effect of the relatively
light Spartiate casualties at Leuctra, and possibly as great as
the effect of the loss of Messenia, which was the political pen¬
alty of Sparta’s military defeat. When Aristotle was writing
his Politics, this unfortunate law was already producing no¬
ticeably untoward results. By the time of King Agis the Mar¬
tyr, who came to the throne early in the latter half of the
third century b.c., ‘not more than 700 Spartiates survived, and
of these perhaps 100 may have owned land and an allotment,
while the remainder were a destitute and disfranchised mob.’ 6
Another conspicuous social phenomenon in the Spartan deca¬
dence was ‘the monstrous regiment of women.’ Like the mal¬
distribution of property, this maldistribution of influence and
authority as between the two sexes was already noticeable at
Sparta in Aristotle’s time; and in the legend of the Saviour
Kings, Agis and Cleomenes, who reigned at Sparta a century
later, the part assigned to the noble women who inspire and
encourage and console and mourn the heroes is as prominent
as it is in the New Testament. This legend suggests that, not¬
withstanding Aristotle’s strictures on the behaviour of the
Spartan women during Epaminondas’ invasion of the Eurotas
Valley in the winter of 370-369 b.c., it was really through
their virtues that, in the age of Spartan decadence, the Spartan
women established their moral ascendancy over their husbands
and their sons; and, if this is the truth, it throws some light
upon the failure of the ‘Lycurgean’ system. For, although the

system had been applied to women as well as to men, the

Spartan girls and Spartan married women had not been sub¬
jected to its pressure in the same degree as their brothers and
their husbands; and if we are right in our belief that the moral
breakdown of Spartan manhood was the penalty of a moral
rigidity which had been produced by the excessive severity
of the ‘Lycurgean’ temper, then we may conjecture that it was
the relative immunity of the women from this unnatural strain
that left them with the moral elasticity to bend and rebound
in reaction to an ordeal which broke the spirit of the Spartan
men outright.
The epitaph of the ‘Lycurgean’ system has been written by
Aristotle in the form of a general proposition:
Peoples ought not to train themselves in the art of war with an

eye to subjugating neighbours who do not deserve to be subjugated
. . . The paramount aim of any social system should be to frame
military institutions, like all its other institutions, with an eye to
the circumstances of peace-time, when the soldier is off duty; and
this proposition is borne out by the facts of experience. For mili¬
taristic states are apt to survive only so long as they remain at war,
while they go to ruin as soon as they have finished making their
conquests. Peace causes their metal to lose its temper; and the fault
lies with a social system which does not teach its soldiers what to
make of their lives when they are off duty.
Thus the ‘Lycurgean’ system ultimately and inevitably de¬

stroyed itself; yet, even in committing suicide, the system died
hard. Although it had been brought into existence for the
precise purpose of enabling Sparta to maintain possession of
Messenia, the ‘Lycurgean’ agoge actually continued to be prac¬
tised at Sparta, out of sheer conservatism, for nearly two cen¬
turies after Messenia had been irrevocably lost. And, although
King Cleomenes the Martyr tardily replaced the 4,000 lost
Spartiate allotments in Messenia by redividing the territory
that remained to Sparta east of Taygetus, in the Eurotas Val¬

ley, into new allotments of an equal number, the royal revo¬
lutionary did not take this opportunity to liberate his country
from the ancient curse of helotage. Since the 700 surviving
Spartiates, all told, could not take up as much as 20 per cent,
of the 4,000 allotments into which the estates of the 100 surviv¬
ing Spartiate ‘Peers’ were now broken up, Cleomenes pre¬
sumably gave the Spartan franchise to more than 3,000 Helots
and Perioeci in order to fill up the numbers of his new Spartan
citizen-body; but these were only a minority of the surviving
Helots; for Cleomenes freed 6,000 more of them, at so much
a head in ready money, and enrolled 2,000 of these freedmen
in his army, on the eve of the Battle of Sellasia, when his Mace¬
donian adversary Antigonus Doson had reached Tegea. And
when the Romans invaded Laconia in 195 b.c., they found
Helots still living on there in their traditional status.
The most remarkable feat of Spartan ‘Diehardism’ was the
attempt of the Royal Martyrs, Agis and Cleomenes, to reclothe
the dry bones of the ‘Lycurgean’ system in flesh, and to
breathe the breath of new life into the corpse, a full century
and a half after the great Spartan victory over Athens had
sealed the ‘Lycurgean’ system’s fate. In this last desperate tour
de force the derelict wheel of Spartan life was turned, by a
supreme conservative effort, so very far back that it actually
made a revolution; and this violent movement finally wrecked
the long-dislocated mechanism. Cleomenes’ surgery effectively
killed a body social which it could not possibly cure. The
bruised reed was broken by the hand that sought to straighten
it; and the smoking flax was quenched for ever by the breath
which was intended to rekindle a flame.
Thereafter Sparta lived wholly in her dreams of the past
and distinguished herself-if it be a distinction-in nothing but
the peculiar zest with which she threw herself into the aca-
demic game of archaism that was in fashion throughout the

Hellenic World during the first two centuries of the Roman
Empire. The Spartans of the Imperial age delighted, like all
their contemporaries, in composing honorary inscriptions in
a caricature of their obsolete local dialect; but at Sparta these
harmless archaistic pedantries were accompanied by at least
one archaistic morbidity of a gruesome nature. A primitive
fertility-rite of scourging boys at the altar of Artemis Orthia,
which had been converted by the ‘Lycurgean’ system, for its
own grim but still utilitarian purposes, into a competition in
the endurance of pain, was exaggerated, in Plutarch’s day, into
a sadistic atrocity, in which boys were keyed up to a pitch of
hysteria at which they submitted to be flogged to death. ‘This
would not be incredible of the Spartan youth of the present
day,’ Plutarch writes in recounting the famous legendary story
of the Spartan boy and the stolen fox, ‘since I myself have
seen numbers of them die under the flogging at Orthia’s altar.’
The essence of this scene, in which a superhuman—or inhuman
—feat of endurance is performed without flinching, yet to no
effect, is characteristic of the Spartan ethos and emblematic of
Sparta’s fate. For if any Spartiate ever prayed, for the peace
of his soul, that tantus labor non sit cassus, that prayer was
assuredly breathed by Spartan lips in vain.
The vanity of Spartan wishes is exposed in the outcome of
an otherwise unimportant arbitral transaction which the Roman
historian Tacitus records—apparently without realizing its his¬
toric significance—in his annals of the Roman Empire in the
year 25 of the Christian Era:
A hearing was given to delegations from the Lacedaemonian and

Messenian Governments in the matter of the juridical status of the
temple of Diana [i.e. Artemis] Limnatis. The Lacedaemonians
maintained that the temple had been founded by their own La¬
cedaemonian forefathers on Lacedaemonian territory, and they
supported their claim by an appeal to literary evidence, both his¬

torical and poetic. They declared that the temple had been taken
from them forcibly in war, by Philip of Macedon, and had after¬
wards been restored to them on the strength of a legal opinion
which had been rendered by Gaius Caesar and Marcus Antonius.
The Messenians, on their side, brought up the ancient division of
the Peloponnese among the descendants of Hercules [i.e. Hera-
kles], and maintained that the territory of Dentheliatis, in which
the temple was situated, had been part of the portion assigned to
their king. They declared that there were actual records of the
transaction still extant, engraved on stone and on archaic bronze;
and they added that, if there was to be an appeal to literary evi¬
dence, they could also beat the Lacedaemonians in the amount and
in the fulness of the testimony of this kind which they were in a
position to cite. As for King Philip’s decision, they argued that it
had not been an act of arbitrary power, but had been based upon
the facts and had been confirmed by identic judgements of the
Macedonian king Antigonus and the Roman general Mummius; by
an arbitral decision of the Milesian Government; and most recently
by the decision of Atidius Geminus, the Governor of the Roman
Province of Achaia. On this showing, judgement was now given in
the Messenian Government’s favour.
Thus, in the first century of the Christian Era, the Spartans

were still contending—and this last time without success—over
the debatable territory in the mountainous borderland between
the Eurotas Valley and Messenia which their forefathers had
originally contended for, and conquered, in the eighth cen¬
tury b.c. A dispute over the Dentheliatis was the traditional
cause of the First Messeno-Spartan War; and now, after the
passage of at least eight centuries, the same dispute between
the same two parties over the same insignificant piece of terri¬
tory was at issue before the arbitral tribunal of the Roman
Emperor Tiberius. Assuredly no further proof is needed that
the Spartans were veritably a people without a history.
CHAPTER IV
Assyria, the Strong Man Armed
The blindness of the militarist is the theme of a famous parable

in the New Testament:
When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in
peace; but when a stronger than he shall come upon him and
overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he
trusted, and divideth his spoils.
The militarist is so confident of his own ability to look

after himself in that social—or anti-social—system in which all
disputes are settled manu militari, and not by process of law
or conciliation, that he throws his sword into the scales when
the issue between a regime of violence and a regime of or¬
ganized peace is trembling in the balance. The sword’s weight
duly tips the balance in favour of the continuance of the old
barbaric dispensation; and the militarist, exultant at having
once more made his will prevail, now points to this latest tri¬
umph as a final proof that the sword is omnipotent. In the
next chapter of the story, however, it turns out that he has
failed to prove his thesis ad hominem in the particular case
which exclusively interests him; for the next event is his own
overthrow by a stronger militarist than himself. His success in
prolonging the militarist regime has simply insured that he
himself shall learn, at last, what it feels like to have one’s throat
5<* WAR AND CIVILIZATION
cut. We may think of the Aztecs and the Incas, each remorse¬
lessly warring down their weaker neighbours in their own re¬
spective worlds, until they are overtaken by Spanish conquis¬
tador es who fall upon them from another world and strike
them down with weapons for which theirs are no match. It is
equally illuminating, and considerably more profitable, to think
of ourselves.
In the Hellenic Mythology the doom which ‘the strong man
armed invincibly insists upon bringing upon himself is por¬
trayed in the legend of how Cronos brutally supplants his
father Uranus in the lordship of the Universe, only to taste,
in his turn, of Uranus’ experience at the hands of the usurper’s
own son Zeus. In Zeus we have the picture of the militarist
who is saved in spite of himself, thanks to the suffering of an¬
other being who is nobler, as well as wiser, than he is; and
Prometheus salvation of Zeus is a Hellenic counterpart of
Jesus salvation of Peter when Peter commits the militarist’s
crime at the crucial moment in the Garden of Gethsemane.
And, behold, one of them which were with Jesus stretched

out his hand and drew his sword and struck a servant of the High
Priests and smote off his ear. Then said Jesus unto him: ‘Put up
again thy sword into his place; for all they that take the sword
shall perish with the sword.’
In the Old Testament the classic portrayal of the militarist’s

self-contrived discomfiture is given in the story of Ben-Hadad
and Ahab. When King Ben-Hadad of Damascus is besieging
King Ahab of Israel in his city of Samaria, the aggressor sends
messengers into the beleaguered city to demand of his victim
the surrender of everything that he possesses, and Ahab returns
the soft answer: ‘My lord, O king, according to thy saying,
I am thine and all that I have.’ But Ben-Hadad will not forbear
from humiliating his humble adversary still further; so he
ASSYRIA, THE STRONG MAN ARMED 57
sends a second message to inform Ahab that the conqueror’s
servants will now come to search his house, and that, ‘whatso¬
ever is pleasant in’ Ahab’s ‘eyes, they shall put it in their hand
and take it away.’ Thereupon Ahab replies that he still accepts
the first demand but rejects the second; and, when Ben-Hadad
proceeds to breathe fire and slaughter, Ahab says to the bearers
of this third message: ‘Tell him: “Let not him that girdeth on
his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off.” ’ Thereafter,
according to Ben-Hadad’s will and against the wishes of Ahab,
the issue between the two kings is decided in a pitched battle;
and in this battle the aggressor brings upon himself an over¬
whelming defeat. The story ends with a tableau in which the
servants of Ben-Hadad come out—from the city in which they
and their master are now being besieged in their turn—with
sackcloth on their loins and ropes on their heads, and plead
with the victorious Ahab for mercy. And Ahab is not betrayed
into making Ben-Hadad’s mistake by the reversal of roles that
has so swiftly inverted the two kings’ respective positions. To
the message ‘Thy servant Ben-Hadad saith: “I pray thee, let
me live,” ’ Ahab answers: ‘Is he yet alive? He is my brother.
And, when, on his instructions, Ben-Hadad is brought with
honour into his presence, Ahab makes a treaty with his peni¬
tent opponent—on the extremely favourable terms which Ben-
Hadad is in haste to offer him—and then straightway lets him
go free.
We may next consider the case of the Assyrian militarism
which cast its shadow over the Syriac World in Ahab s and
Ben-Hadad’s generation.
The disaster in which the Assyrian military power met its
end in 614-610 b.c. was even more overwhelming than those
which overtook the Macedonian phalanx in 197 and 168 b.c. or
the Roman legions in 53 b.c. and a.d. 378 or the Egyptian
Mamluks in a.d. 1516-17 and a.d. 1798. The disaster at Pydna
cost Macedon her political independence; the disaster at Adria-

nople was surmounted by the Roman Empire at the price of
‘scrapping’ the defeated legionary and enlisting the victorious
cataphract in his place; the French repetition of the original
Ottoman blow was needed in order to remove the Mamluk
incubus, once for all, from the backs of an Egyptian peasantry
which managed to survive the French and the Ottoman as well
as the Mamluk domination. On the other hand the disaster
which was the end of the Assyrian military power capped the
destruction of the Assyrian war-machine with the extinction
of the Assyrian state and the extermination of the Assyrian
people. In 614-610 b.c. a community which had been in exist¬
ence for more than two thousand years, and had been playing
an ever more dominant part in South-Western Asia over a
period of some two and a half centuries, was blotted out al¬
most completely.
The noise of a whip and the noise of the rattling of the wheels
and of the prancing horses and of the jumping chariots.
The horseman lifteth up both the bright sword and the glitter-
ing spear; and there is a multitude of slain and a great number of
carcases; and there is none end of their corpses—they stumble upon
their corpses . . .
Thy shepherds slumber, O King of Assyria; thy nobles shall
dwell in the dust; thy people is scattered upon the mountains, and
no man gathereth them.
In this instance the curse of the victim v/ho had lived to

see his oppressor’s fall was fulfilled in the sequel with an ex¬
traordinary precision. In 401 b.c., when Cyrus the Younger’s
ten thousand Greek mercenaries were retreating up the Tigris
Valley from the battle-field of Cunaxa towards the Black Sea
coast, they passed in succession the sites of Calah and Nineveh,
and were struck with astonishment, not so much at the mas-
siveness of the fortifications and the extent of the area which
they embraced, as at the spectacle of such vast works of Man
lying uninhabited. The weirdness of these empty shells, which
testified by their inanimate endurance to the vigour of a van¬
ished life, is vividly conveyed by the literary art of a member
of the Greek expeditionary force who has recounted its ex¬
periences. Yet what is still more astonishing to a modern West¬
ern reader of Xenophon’s narrative—acquainted, as he is, with
the history of Assyria, thanks to the achievements of our mod¬
ern Western archaeologists—is to find that, although Xeno¬
phon’s imagination was deeply struck, and his curiosity keenly
aroused, by the mystery of these deserted cities, he was unable
to learn even the most elementary facts about their authentic
history. Although the whole of South-Western Asia, from
Jerusalem to Ararat and from Elam to Lydia, had been dom¬
inated and terrorized by the masters of these cities at a Time-
distance of little more than two centuries from the date at
which Xenophon passed that way, the best account that he is
able to give of them—presumably on the authority of the
Greek army’s local guides—is more wildly fabulous than the
account of the Egyptian Pyramid-Builders which has found
its way into the work of Herodotus after having travelled in
the solvent waters of the stream of ‘folk-memory’ for the
length of little less than two and a half millennia. As Xenophon
heard the story of Calah and Nineveh, these were two cities
of the Medes which had been besieged by the Persians when
Cyrus was wresting the empire from Astyages, and had been
miraculously depopulated by divine intervention after the Per¬
sians had found themselves unable to take them by storm. Not
even the bare name of Assyria was associated with the sites of
her second and third capitals in the current legends, attaching
to these sites, which came to the ears of the passing Greek
inquirer.
/
6o WAR AND CIVILIZATION
Where is the dwelling of the lions and the feedingplace of the

young lions, where the lion, even the old lion, walked, and the
lion’s whelp, and none made them afraid?
As a matter of fact, if the Ten Thousand had happened to

march up the right bank of the Tigris, instead of crossing, as
they did, to the left bank at Sittace on the Babylon-Susa road,
they would have passed the site of Asshur—the first and epony¬
mous capital of the Assyrium nomen—and here they would
have found, still squatting among the ruins, a small and miser¬
able population that had not forgotten its historical title to
the Assyrian name. Yet Xenophon’s fabulous account of Calah
and Nineveh is nearer to ‘the philosophic truth’ than our own
archaeologists’ discovery of the traces left by the squatters at
Asshur; for in substance the catastrophe of 614-610 b.c. did
wipe Assyria out; and in the Achaemenian Empire of Xeno¬
phon s day the surviving Assyrian helots were incomparably
less conspicuous than the vestiges of the peoples round about,
whom the Assyrian militarists had once trampled under foot
and ground, as they thought, to powder. In an age when the
very name and nationality of Nineveh or Calah were forgotten,
Susa, which had been sacked by Asshurbanipal’s army citcci
639 B-c-> was the capital of an empire whose effective dominion
now extended, in almost every direction, an immense distance
beyond the farthest points ever reached by Assyrian raiders.
One of the subsidiary capitals of this empire was Babylon,
which had been sacked by Sennacherib in 689 b.c. The Phoeni¬
cian city-states, which the Assyrians had incessantly bullied
and fleeced from the ninth century to the seventh, were now
autonomous and contented members of a Syriac universal state-
and even the Syriac and Hittite communities of the interior,
which had apparently been pounded into pulp by the Assyrian
flail, had contrived to retain a semblance of their former state¬
hood in the guise of hierocratically administered temple-states.
In fact, within two centuries of Assyria’s fall it had become

clear that the Assyrian militarists had done their work for the
benefit of others, and for the greatest benefit of those whom
they had used the most despitefully. In grinding down the
highland peoples of the Zagros and the Taurus the Assyrians
had opened a passage for the Cimmerian and Scythian Nomads
to make their descent upon the Babylonic and Syriac worlds;
in deporting the broken peoples of Syria to the opposite ex¬
tremity of their empire they had placed the Syriac Society in
a position to encircle and eventually assimilate the Babylonic
Society to which the Assyrians themselves belonged; in im¬
posing a political unity upon the heart of South-Western Asia
by main force they had prepared the ground for their own
‘successor-states'—Media, Babylonia, Egypt, and Lydia—and for
these successors’ common heir, the Achaemenian Empire. Why
was it that in the sequel to the long Assyrian terror the mon¬
ster came off, as these comparisons and contrasts show, so very
much worse than his victims?
The victims themselves, in retrospect, could only explain this
tremendous ‘reversal of roles’ by invoking ‘the Envy of the
Gods.’
Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches

and with a shadowing shroud and of an high stature; and his top
was among the thick boughs ...
The cedars in the garden of God could not hide him; the fir
trees were not like his boughs, and the chestnut trees were not
like his branches; nor any tree in the Garden of God was like
unto him in his beauty.
I have made him fair by the multitude of his branches, so that
all the trees of Eden, that were in the Garden of God, envied him.
Therefore thus saith the Lord God: ‘Because thou hast lifted up
thyself in height, and he hath shot up his top among the thick
boughs, and his heart is lifted up in his height _
‘I have therefore delivered him into the hand of the mighty
6z WAR AND CIVILIZATION
one of the heathen; he shall surely deal with him; I have driven
him out for his wickedness.
‘And strangers, the terrible of the nations, have cut him off and
have left him; upon the mountains and in all the valleys his
branches are fallen; and his boughs are broken by all the rivers of
the land; and all the people of the Earth are gone down from
his shadow and have left him.’
Are we able in this instance to interpret the working of

‘the Envy of the Gods’ in terms of the stricken creature’s own
behaviour? At first sight the fate of Assyria does, indeed, seem
difficult to comprehend; for her militarists cannot be con¬
victed of the passive aberration to which we may attribute the
undoing of the Macedonians and the Romans and the Mamluks,
who ‘rested on their oars.’ At the time when the Mamluk and
Roman and Macedonian war-machines each met with its fatal
accident they were each of them long since static, hopelessly
obsolete, and shockingly out of repair. On the other hand the
Assyrian war-machine, which is singled out by the complete¬
ness of its final disaster, is also distinguished from these other
war-machines—in what would seem to be the opposite sense—
by the efficiency with which it was being perpetually over¬
hauled and renovated and reinforced right down to the day of
its destruction. The fund of military genius which produced
the embryo of the hoplite in the fourteenth century b.c., on
the eve of Assyria’s first bid for predominance in South-
Western Asia, and the embryo of the cataphract horse-archer
in the seventh century b.c., on the eve of Assyria’s own anni¬
hilation, was also productive throughout the seven intervening
centuries, and never more so than in the final paroxysm of the
four historic bouts in which the Assyrian militarism discharged
itself upon the World. The energetic inventiveness, and the
restless zeal for improvements, which were the notes of the
latter-day Assyrian ethos in its application to the Art of War,
are attested unimpeachably by the series of bas-reliefs, found

in situ in the royal palaces, in which the successive phases of
the Assyrian military equipment and technique during the last
three centuries of Assyrian history are recorded pictorially with
careful precision and in minute detail.
On this evidence we can detect the following improvements
between the end of the third bout, circa, 825 b.c., and the end
of the fourth bout just over two. hundred years later. The
mounted infantryman of Asshurnazirpal’s day, who had been
placed on horseback—no doubt, in imitation of the Nomads
without being relieved of the encumbrance of his infantry¬
man’s shield, has now turned into an embryonic cataphract
who has discarded the shield in exchange for a flexible cuirass.
This equipment of the cavalry with body-armour has been
made feasible by an improvement in the shape and material of
the cuirass itself, which is now made of metal scales and is cut
off at the waist, in substitution for the clumsy wadded or
leathern kaftan, reaching from the neck to the knees, which
had done duty for a cuirass in the earlier age. The cavalry¬
man’s legs, which are thus left exposed, are protected in com¬
pensation by stockings reaching to the thighs and boots reach¬
ing to the calf; and the same footgear enables the infantry to
operate in rough country with greater ease than in an age
when sandals had been the only alternative to going barefoot.
Within the same span of Time there have been a number of
improvements in the war-chariots: for instance, an increase in
the diameter of the wheels, in the height of the sides of the
body, and in the number of the crew-the driver and the
archer being now reinforced by a couple of shield-bearers.
There has also been an improvement in the shape of the wicker
screens from behind which the foot-archers shoot. Perhaps the
greatest improvement of all, however, is one of which we are
informed, not by the pictorial evidence of the bas-reliefs, but
by the written word of the inscriptions; and this is the institu¬

tion of a royal standing army, which was probably the work
of either Tiglath-Pileser III (regnabat 747-727 b.c.) or Sargon
(regnabat 722-705 b.c.). The standing army served as a nu¬
cleus, and not as a substitute, for the national militia on which
the Assyrian Crown had previously depended for the recruit¬
ment of its field armies. Nevertheless the establishment of a
standing army must have raised the general level of Assyrian
military efficiency, and have insured that the technical im¬
provements, mentioned above, should produce the maximum
of effect.
By Asshurbanipal’s time (regnabat 669-626 b.c.), on the eve
of the great catastrophe, two centuries of steady progress in
the Art of War had produced an Assyrian army which was
as well prepared for every task as it was scientifically differ¬
entiated into a number of specialized arms. There were the
chariotry and the demi-cataphract horse-archers; the heavy
foot-archers, armoured from helmet to boots, and the light
foot-archers who risked their lives in head-bands, loin-cloths,
and sandals; the hoplites, armed like the heavy foot-archers,
except that they carried spear and shield instead of bow and
quiver; and the peltasts, likewise carrying spear and shield, but
wearing, in lieu of a cuirass, a pectoral secured by crossed
shoulder-straps. There was probably also a corps of engineers,
for there was certainly a siege-train—not, indeed, of catapults,
but of battering-rams and rolling towers—and, when these en¬
gines had done their work, and the walls of the enemy fortress
had been breached, the Assyrian directors of military opera¬
tions knew how to cover the storming parties with volleys of
arrows from massed batteries of archers. Thus fitted out, the
Assyrian army was equally ready for siege operations, for
mountain warfare, or for pitched battles on the plains; and its
activism in the sphere of technique was matched by an activism
in tactics and strategy. The Assyrians were firm believers in

the sovereign virtue of the offensive.
None shall be weary nor stumble among them; none shall slum¬
ber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor
the latchet of their shoes be broken;
Whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent, their horses’
hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind;
Their roaring shall be like a lion, they shall roar like young
lions; yea, they shall roar and lay hold of the prey, and shall carry
it away safe, and none shall deliver it.
This was the spirit of the Assyrian army down to the last,
as was shown by the account which it gave of itself in the
Harran campaign of 610 b.c., when it was fighting for a lost
cause, with the capital city of the Empire already taken by
storm and blotted out. It will be apparent that the Assyrian
army on the eve of its annihilation was not at all in the condi¬
tion of the Macedonian and Roman and Mamluk armies in
168 b.c. and a.d. 378 and a.d. 1798. Why, then, did it suffer a
more appalling disaster than theirs? The answer is that the very
activism of the Assyrian military spirit aggravated Assyria’s
doom when at last it closed in upon her.
In the first place the policy of the unremitting offensive, and
the possession of a potent instrument for putting this policy
into effect, led the Assyrian war-lords in the fourth and last
bout of their militarism to extend their enterprises and com¬
mitments far beyond the limits within which their predecessors
had kept. Assyria was subject to a perpetual prior call upon
her military resources for the fulfilment of her task as warden
of the marches of the Babylonic World against the barbarian
highlanders in the Zagros and the Taurus on the one side and
against the Aramaean pioneers of the Syriac Civilization on the
other. In her three earlier bouts of militarism she had been
content to pass from the defensive to the offensive on these

two fronts, without pressing this offensive a outrance and with¬
out dissipating her forces in other directions. Even so, the third
bout, which occupied the two middle quarters of the ninth
century b.c., evoked in Syria the temporary coalition of Syrian
states which checked the Assyrian advance at Qarqar in 853
b.c., and it was met in Armenia by the more formidable riposte
of the foundation of the Kingdom of Urartu, an ex-barbarian
military Power which now borrowed the Assyrians’ culture in
order to equip itself for resisting their aggression on equal
terms. In spite of these recent warnings, Tiglath-Pileser III
(regnabat 746-727 b.c.), when he inaugurated the last and
greatest of the Assyrian offensives, allowed himself to harbour
political ambitions and to aim at military objectives which
brought Assyria into collision with three new adversaries—
Babylonia, Elam, and Egypt—each of whom was potentially as
great a military power as Assyria herself.
Tiglath-Pileser put a conflict with Egypt in store for his
successors when he set himself to complete the subjugation of
the petty states of Syria; for Egypt could not remain indiffer¬
ent to an extension of the Assyrian Empire up to her own
Asiatic frontiers, and she was in a position to frustrate or undo
the Assyrian empire-builders’ work unless and until they made
up their minds to round it off by embarking on the more for¬
midable enterprise of subjugating Egypt herself. Tiglath-
Pileser’s bold occupation of Philistia in 734 b.c. may have been
a strategic master-stroke which was rewarded by the tempo¬
rary submission of Samaria in 733 and the fall of Damascus in
732. But it led to Sargon’s brush with the Egyptians in 720,
and Sennacherib’s in 700, on the Syro-Egyptian border; and
these inconclusive encounters led on, in their turn, to Esarhad-
don’s conquest and occupation of Egypt, from the Delta to the
Thebaid inclusive, in the campaigns of 675 and 674 and 671
b.c. Thereupon it became manifest that, while the Assyrians

were strong enough to rout Egyptian armies and occupy the
land of Egypt and repeat the feat, they were not strong enough
to hold Egypt down. Esarhaddon himself was once more on
the march for Egypt when death overtook him in 669; and
though the Egyptian insurrection which then broke out was
successfully suppressed by Asshurbanipal in 667, he had to re¬
conquer Egypt once again in 663. By this time the Assyrian
Government itself seems to have realized that in Egypt it was
engaged on Psyche’s Task; and when Psammetichus unobtru¬
sively expelled the Assyrian garrisons in 658-651 Asshurbani¬
pal turned a blind eye to what was happening. In thus cutting
his Egyptian losses the King of Assyria was undoubtedly wise;
yet this wisdom after the event was a confession that the ener¬
gies expended on five Egyptian campaigns had been wasted;
and Asshurbanipal’s withdrawal did not restore the status quo
ante 675 b.c.; for the loss of Egypt in the fifth decade of the
seventh century was a prelude to the loss of Syria in the next
generation.
The ultimate consequences of Tiglath-Pileser’s intervention
in Babylonia were far graver than those of his forward policy
in Syria, since they led, by a direct chain of cause-and-effect,
to the catastrophe of 614-610 b.c.
This Assyrian aggression in this quarter in 745 b.c. must
have been difllcult to reconcile with the treaty in which the
Assyro-Babylonian frontier had been delimited by friendly
agreement—and this along a line which was decidedly favour¬
able to Assyria—in the opening decade of the eighth century
b.c. Probably Tiglath-Pileser justified his action on the ground
that the anarchy into which Babylonia had since fallen was
spreading to the Assyrian side of the border; and, after march¬
ing in, he appears to have received some kind of mandate from
the citizens of Babylon, who saw in this sovereign of a neigh-
bouring sedentary kingdom of kindred culture a possible pro¬

tector of civic life in Babylonia against the rising tide of local
Aramaean and Chaldaean Nomadism. It may also be true that
both Tiglath-Pileser and his successors were genuinely anxious
to restrict the Assyrian commitments in Babylonia to a mini¬
mum, and to avoid annexation. Tiglath-Pileser himself in 745
left Nabopolassar, the reigning king of Babylonia, on his
throne; and it was only after Nabopolassar’s death eleven years
later, and after the subsequent suppression of a consequent
Chaldaean tribal insurrection against the Assyrian protectorate,
that Tiglath-Pileser ‘took the hands of Bel’ in 729. This prece¬
dent was followed by Shalmaneser V; but it was not followed
by Shalmaneser’s successor Sargon until a second, and far more
serious, Chaldaean insurrection forced Sargon, in his turn, to
‘take the hands of Bel’ in 710; and, even then, the Assyrian
victor sought an understanding with the discomfited Chaldaean
arch-insurgent Merodach-Baladan. Thereafter, when Sennach¬
erib succeeded his father Sargon in 705, he deliberately ab¬
stained from assuming the Babylonian Crown; and, even when
a fresh Chaldaean insurrection necessitated his intervention in
Babylonia in 703, he conferred the Babylonian Crown first
upon an Assyrianized Babylonian prince, and then upon an
Assyrian prince who was not himself the heir to the Assyrian
Throne. It was only after the great insurrection of 694-689
that Sennacherib formally put an end to the independence of
Babylonia by installing his own son—and designated successor—
Esarhaddon as Assyrian governor-general.
These facts certainly seem to testify to an Assyrian policy
of moderation vis-a-vis Babylonia; but they afford still more
conclusive evidence that the policy was a failure. Again and
again the Assyrian Government’s hand was forced by Chal¬
daean insurrections which only became more frequent and
more formidable in the face of persistent Assyrian forbearance.
And, while the Assyrian intervention did perform the miracle

of conjuring order out of a Babylonian chaos, this order, so
far from being achieved under an Assyrian aegis, was the by¬
product of an anti-Assyrian movement which steadily grew in
scope and lustily throve upon defeat.
The first stage in a process which continued for a century
and culminated in a Medo-Babylonian grand alliance was the
political unification of all the Chaldaean tribes of Babylonia be¬
tween 731 and 721 b.c. under the leadership of the Chief of
Bit Yakin, Merodach-Baladan. The next stage was an alliance
between the Chaldaeans and the Kingdom of Elam, whose
Government had been as seriously alarmed by Tiglath-Pileser’s
intervention in Babylonia as the Egyptians had been alarmed
by his descent upon Philistia. Thanks to this Elamite alliance,
Merodach-Baladan was able to enter the City of Babylon in
721 and to reign there as king of Babylonia for some twelve
years, in spite of the fact that at this stage the citizens of the
capital still felt the rule of the local Nomad more irksome than
that of the foreign sedentary Power. Nor was Merodach-
Baladan’s career at an end when he was ejected from Babylon
by the armies of Sargon in 710. After his Assyrian conqueror’s
death in 705 we find the indefatigable Chaldaean entering into
relations with the Arabs of the Shamiyah and the Elamad, and
sending an embassy across their ranges to so distant a fellow
enemy of Assyria as the King of Judah, Hezekiah. Thereafter,
in 703, Merodach-Baladan succeeded in re-occupying Babylon
with the aid of his Elamite allies; and, although before the year
was out he was ejected for the second time by force of As¬
syrian arms, and died a few years later as a refugee in Elam,
the removal of the Chaldaean leader brought the Assyrian Gov¬
ernment no nearer to a solution of the Chaldaean problem; for,
with Elam still supporting them, the Chaldaean tribesmen suc¬
cessfully defied Sennacherib’s efforts to put them out of action.
When the Assyrian war-lord occupied and devastated their

tribal lands in Babylonia proper, they took refuge among the
marshes and mud-banks at the head of the Persian Gulf; and,
when in 694 he built a fleet on the Tigris, manned it with
Phoenician crews, and put the Assyrian army on board in
order to destroy the Chaldaeans in their aquatic fastness by
amphibious operations, he merely gave the Elamites the oppor¬
tunity to fall upon his line of communications, enter Babylon,
and carry his puppet-king of Babylonia away captive. Nor did
it profit Sennacherib when he took his revenge next year by
defeating the Elamites in the field and capturing, in his turn,
the puppet whom they had set upon the Babylonian Throne in
his own puppet’s place; for he failed to re-occupy Babylon;
and the vacant throne was mounted by a man of character,
Mushezib-Marduk, who succeeded in weaning the citizens of
the capital from their pro-Assyrian policy.
This secession of the City of Babylon in 693 from the As¬
syrian to the Chaldaeo-Elamite camp was perhaps the decisive
event in the long process of building up an anti-Assyrian front;
for, although the Assyrians were, as usual, victorious over the
combined Chaldaean and Elamite forces, and were able in the
end to teach Babylon a lesson by sacking her in 689, the lesson
which she learned was the opposite of that which her teachers
intended. Through this impious outrage upon a city which
was the cultural capital of their world, the Assyrians achieved
a feat of political alchemy in Babylonia which the Babylonians
could never have achieved for themselves. In the white heat of
the common hatred which this Assyrian ‘frightfulness’ had
now aroused among the ancient urban population as well as
among the intrusive Nomads, citizens and tribesmen forgot the
mutual antipathy which had hitherto divided them, and be¬
came fused together into a new Babylonian nation which could
neither forget nor forgive what it had suffered at Assyrian
hands, and which could never rest until it had brought its op¬
pressor to the ground.
At this penultimate stage of the long and tragic process
which Tiglath-Pileser III had unwittingly set in motion in 745
B.c., the anti-Assyrian feeling in Babylonia was so strong that
it was able to dominate, and bend to its purpose, the soul of
an Assyrian prince-of-the-blood who had been placed upon
the Babylonian Throne by force majeure and who was actually
the brother of the reigning king of Assyria itself. Circa 654
b.c. Asshurbanipal found the existence of the Assyrian Empire
threatened by a hostile coalition between the Babylonian
Crown, the Chaldaean and Aramaean tribes of the Babylonian
country-side, the Kingdom of Elam, the Northern Arabs, sev¬
eral South Syrian principalities, and the recently established
‘successor-state’ of the defunct Assyrian dominion over Egypt.
This combine of anti-Assyrian forces, which was wider than
any that had ever been brought together by Merodach-Baladan
or by Mushezib-Marduk, was headed by Asshurbanipal’s own
brother, Shamash-shum-ukin; and his action will appear the
more extraordinary when we consider that by that date he had
been in peaceful occupation of the Babylonian Throne, with
Asshurbanipal’s goodwill, for some fifteen years, in execution
of their father Esarhaddon’s political testament. Moreover the
arch-rebel’s principal ally, Elam, had just received—perhaps as
recently as the very year before Shamash-shum-ukin staked
his fortunes on her support—the heaviest defeat that had ever
yet been inflicted upon her by Assyrian arms, a defeat in which
the reigning king and his heir-apparent had been killed and
both the royal cities captured. These facts give the measure of
the strength of the Babylonian national movement that swept
Shamash-shum-ukin off his feet.
In this crisis the Assyrian army was victorious once again.
The traitor Shamash-shum-ukin escaped a worse fate by bum-
ing himself alive in his palace when Babylon was starved into
surrender in 648; and circa 639 Elam was dealt such an anni¬
hilating blow by Assyrian arms that her derelict territory passed
under the dominion of the Persian highlanders from her eastern
hinterland and became the jumping-off ground from which the
Achaemenidae leapt into an empty saddle when they made
themselves masters of all South-Western Asia a century later.
This sacrifice of the Babylonian nationalists’ Assyrian and
Elamite instruments in the war of 654-639 b.c. did not, how¬
ever, prevent the Babylonian national movement itself from at¬
taining its objective; for, if the Achaemenidae found the saddle
empty in the sixth century, this was because the Assyrian rider
had been thrown at last before the seventh century was out.
Immediately after Asshurbanipal’s death in 626 Babylonia re¬
volted again under a new national leader; and this Nabopolassar
completed the work which Merodach-Baladan had begun. In
the new Kingdom of Media he found a more potent ally to fill
the place of the defunct Kingdom of Elam; and Assyria, who
had not recovered from the War of 654-639, was wiped out of
existence in the War of 614-610 b.c. Even then, in extremis,
the Assyrian army could still win victories in the field. With
the help of Assyria’s former vassals and present patrons the
Sai'tes, it drove the Babylonians back upon Harran in 610, at a
stage in this war of annihilation when Harran itself as well as
Nineveh and Asshur was already sacked and devastated, and
when the army was fighting with its back to the Euphrates in
the last unconquered corner of the Assyrian homeland; but this
final victory must have been the Assyrian army’s death agony,
for this is the last recorded incident in the Assyrian military
annals.
When we gaze back over the century and a half of ever
more virulent warfare which begins with Tiglath-Pileser Ill’s
accession to the throne of Assyria in 745 b.c. and closes with a
Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar’s victory over an Egyptian Necho
at Carchemish in 605, the historical landmarks which stand out
the most prominently at first sight are the successive ‘knock¬
out blows’ by which Assyria destroyed entire communities—
razing cities to the ground and carrying whole peoples away
captive. We think of the sack of Damascus in 732; the sack of
Samaria in 722; the sack of Musasir in 714; the sack of Babylon
in 689; the sack of Sidon in 677; the sack of Memphis in 671;
the sack of Thebes in 663; the sack of Susa circa 639. Of all the
capital cities of all the states within reach of Assyria’s arm, only
Tyre and Jerusalem remained inviolate on the eve of the sack
of Nineveh in 612. The loss and misery which Assyria inflicted
on her neighbours is beyond calculation; and yet the legendary
remark of the canting schoolmaster to the boy whom he is
whipping—‘It hurts you less than it hurts me’—would be a more
pertinent critique of Assyrian military activities than the un¬
ashamedly truculent and naively self-complacent narratives in
which the Assyrian war-lords have presented their own ac¬
count of their performances for the instruction of Posterity.
The full and bombastic Assyrian record of victories abroad
is significantly supplemented by rarer and briefer notices of
troubles at home that give us some inkling of the price at
which the victories were purchased; and, when we examine this
domestic chronicle of Assyria at the height of her military
power, we shall no longer find it strange that her victoriousness
was eventually the death of her.
An increasing excess of military strain revenged itself in an
increasing frequency of palace revolutions and peasant revolts.
As early as the close of the second bout of aggression in the
ninth century b.c. we find Shalmaneser III dying in 827 with
his son on the war-path against him, and Nineveh, Asshur, and
Arbela in rebellion. Asshur rebelled again in 763-762, Arrapka
in 761-760, Gozan in 759; and in 746 the rebellion of Calah, the
74
Assyrian capital of the day, was followed by the extermination
of the ruling dynasty. Tiglath-Pileser III (jegnabat 745-727
b.c.) was a novus homo who could not conceal his provenance
under the borrowed cloak of an historic name; and, if he was
also the Assyrian Marius, the Roman analogy suggests that the
establishment of a professional standing army is to be taken as
a symptom of an advanced stage of social disintegration. We
know that in the Italy of Marius’ day it was the ruin of a war¬
like peasantry, which had been uprooted from the soil by per¬
petual calls to military service on ever more distant campaigns,
that made a standing army both possible and necessary—possi¬
ble because there was now a reservoir of unemployed ‘man¬
power’ to draw upon, and necessary because these men who
had lost their livelihood on the land must be provided with
alternative employment if they were to be restrained from
venting their unhappiness and resentment through the channel
of revolution. We may discern in the establishment of the As¬
syrian standing army a parallel attempt to find the same mili¬
tary solution for the same social problem. This military solu¬
tion, however, was no more successful in allaying the domestic
troubles of Tiglath-Pileser’s Assyria than it was in allaying
those of Marius’ Italy. Tiglath-Pileser’s successor Shalmaneser
V (regnabat 727-722 b.c.) seems to have fallen foul of the City
of Asshur, like Tiglath-Pileser’s predecessors. Sennacherib in
681 was murdered by one of his own sons, who was apparently
hand in glove with the Babylonian nationalists; and we have
seen already how Asshurbanipal’s throne and empire were
threatened by the action of his brother Shamash-shum-ukin,
King of Babylon, in 654, when this renegade Assyrian prince
placed himself at the head of an anti-Assyrian coalition. There¬
with the two streams of domestic stasis and foreign warfare
merge into one; and after Asshurbanipal’s death this swells into
a mighty river whose rushing waters bear Assyria away to her
now inevitable doom. During the last years of Assyrian history
the domestic and the foreign aspect of Assyria’s disintegration
are hardly distinguishable.
The approaching doom cast its shadow over the soul of
Asshurbanipal himself in his declining years.
The rules for making offerings to the dead and libations to the
ghosts of the kings my ancestors, which had not been practiced,
I reintroduced. I did well unto god and man, to dead and living.
Why have sickness, ill-health, misery and misfortune befallen me?
I cannot away with the strife in my country and the dissensions in
my family. Disturbing scandals oppress me alway. Misery of mind
and of flesh bow me down; with cries of woe I bring my days to
an end. On the day of the City-God, the day of the festival, I am
wretched; Death is seizing hold on me and bears me down. With
lamentation and mourning I wail day and night; I groan: O God,
grant even to one who is impious that he may see Thy light.’ How
long, O God, wilt Thou deal thus with me? Even as one who
hath not feared god and goddess am I reckoned.
This confession is remarkable in its unconventionality and

moving in its sincerity and even pathetic in its bewilderment,
but above all it is illuminating in its blindness. When this mood
overtook him, did the last of the Assyrian war-lords never find
himself silently reciting that terrible catalogue of cities sacked
and peoples wiped out by Assyrian arms-a list which con¬
cluded with his own sack of Susa and annihilation of Elam? Or
was the burden of this memory so intolerable that the tormented
militarist thrust it from him, in desperation, whenever it threat¬
ened to overwhelm him? His successor Sin-shar-ishkun, at any
rate, must have lived through a moment when these haunting
recollections closed in on him and would not be denied, as the
Athenians were beset by the ghosts of their misdeeds when
they received the news of the Battle of Aegospotami.
At Athens the disaster was announced by the arrival of the

Paralus, and a wail spread from the Peiraeus through the Long
Walls into the city as the news passed from mouth to mouth.
That night no one slept. Besides mourning for the dead they
mourned far more bitterly for themselves, for they expected to
suffer the fate which they had inflicted upon the Melians (who
were colonists of the Lacedaemonians) when they had besieged and
captured their city, and upon the Histiaeans, the Scionians, the
Toronians, the Aeginetans and many other Hellenic peoples. Next
morning they held an assembly in which it was decided to block
up all the harbours except one, to clear the fortifications for ac¬
tion, to dispose troops to man them, and to put the city into a
thorough state of defence for the eventuality of a siege.
As the Athenian demos felt and acted at this dreadful mo¬

ment in 405 b.c., the last king of Assyria must have felt and
acted in 612 b.c., when he received the news that his Scythian
allies, who had been his last hope of worldly salvation, had
gone over to the enemy and that the united forces of the hos¬
tile coalition were closing in irresistibly upon Nineveh. The
rest of the story is not the same in the two cases; for the Athe¬
nian demos capitulated and was spared by the generosity of the
victors, while King Sin-shar-ishkun in Nineveh stood a siege,
held out to the bitter end, and perished with his people when
the city was taken by storm at the third assault. Thus the doom
which Asshurbanipal had deprecated overwhelmed his succes¬
sor and was not averted either by Asshurbanipal’s tardy contri¬
tion or by his partial conversion from the works of War to the
arts of Peace. Asshurbanipal’s learned library of Babylonic lit¬
erature (an Assyrian museum of a culture which an Assyrian
militarism had blighted) and his exquisite bas-reliefs (designed
by living Assyrian artists, and depicting the scientific slaughter
of man and beast by the Assyrian military technique) had made
of Nineveh by the year 612 b.c. a treasure-house which is not
altogether incomparable with the Athens of 405-404. The treas-
ures of Nineveh were buried under her ruins to enrich a re¬
mote Posterity in the heyday of a civilization which does not
reckon the Babylonic Society among its forebears. But, if Nine¬
veh perished where Athens survived, this was because Assyria
had already committed suicide before her material destruction
overtook her. The clearly attested progress of the Aramaic lan¬
guage at the expense of the native Akkadian in the Assyrian
homeland during the last century and a half of Assyria’s exist¬
ence as a state shows that the Assyrian people was being peace¬
fully supplanted by the captives of the Assyrian bow and spear
in an age when the Assyrian military power stood at its zenith.
Depopulation was the price which had to be paid for milita¬
rism, and it was a price that was ultimately as ruinous for the
Assyrian army as for the rest of the Assyrian body social. The
indomitable warrior who stood at bay in the breach at Nineveh
in 612 b.c. was ‘a corpse in armour,’ whose frame was only held
erect by the massiveness of the military accoutrements in which
this felo de se had already smothered himself to death. When
the Median and Babylonian storming party reached that stiff
and menacing figure, and sent it clattering and crashing down
the moraine of ruined brickwork into the fosse below, they did
not suspect that their terrible adversary was no longer a living
man at the moment when they struck their daring, and appar¬
ently decisive, blow.
CHAPTER V
The Burden of Nineveh; Charlemagne

and Timur Lenk
We have sketched our portrait of the Assyrian militarism at

full length because it is the prototype of so many signal exam¬
ples of the same aberration. The tableau of the ‘corpse in ar¬
mour’ conjures up a vision of the Spartan phalanx on the bat¬
tle-field at Leuctra in 371 b.c. The ironic fate of the militarist
who is so intemperate in waging wars of annihilation against
his neighbours that he deals unintended destruction to himself
recalls the self-inflicted doom of the Carolingians or the Timu-
rids, who built up great empires out of the agony of their
Saxon or Persian victims, only to provide rich spoils for Scan¬
dinavian or Uzbeg adventurers who lived to see the empire-
builders pay for their imperialism by falling from world power
to impotence within the span of a single lifetime.
Another form of suicide which the Assyrian example calls to
mind is the self-destruction of those militarists—be they bar¬
barians or people of higher culture with a capacity for putting
their talents to a better use—who break into, and break up,
some universal state or other great empire that has been giving
a spell of peace to the peoples and lands over which it has
spread its aegis. The conquerors ruthlessly tear the imperial
mantle into shreds in order to expose the millions of human
beings whom it has sheltered to the terrors of darkness and the
THE BURDEN OF NINEVEH 79
shadow of death, but the shadow descends inexorably upon the
criminals as well as upon their victims. Demoralized on the
morrow of their victory by the splendour and the vastness of
their prize, these new masters of a ravished world are apt, like
the Kilkenny cats, to perform ‘the friendly office’ for one an¬
other until not one brigand in the band is left alive to feast
upon the plunder.
We may watch how the Macedonians, when they have over¬
run the Achaemenian Empire, and have pressed on beyond its
farther frontiers into India, within the eleven years following
Alexander’s passage of the Hellespont, next turn their arms
with equal ferocity against one another during the forty-two
years intervening between Alexander’s death in 323 b.c. and the
overthrow of Lysimachus at Corupedium in 281 b.c. The grim
performance was repeated a thousand years later in another
passage of Syriac history, when the Primitive Muslim Arabs
emulated—and thereby undid—the Hellenic Macedonians’ work
by overruning in twelve years the Roman and Sasanian domin¬
ions in South-Western Asia over almost as wide a sweep of ter¬
ritory as had once been conquered in eleven years by Alexan¬
der from the Achaemenidae. In this Arab case the twelve years
of conquest were followed by the twenty-four years of fratri¬
cidal strife which began with the assassination of the Caliph
’Uthman in a.d. 656 and culminated in the martyrdom of the
Prophet’s grandson Husayn in a.d. 680. Once again the con¬
querors of South-Western Asia fell on one another’s swords;
and the glory and profit of rebuilding a Syriac universal state
which Alexander had overthrown was left to the usurping
Umayyads and to the interloping ’Abbasids, instead of falling
to those companions and descendants of the Prophet whose
lightning conquests had prepared the way. The same spectacle
is presented in the New World when the Aztecs and the Incas
go down before the Spaniards. The Spanish conquistadores of
8o WAR AND CIVILIZATION
the Mexic and the Andean universal state overran two conti¬
nents—from Florida to the Isthmus, and from the Isthmus to
Chile—only to fight over the spoils as ferociously as the com¬
panions of Muhammad or the companions of Alexander; and
the Macedonian war-lord in his grave was not so powerless to
maintain discipline among the troops that had once followed
him in the field as was a living sovereign at Madrid to impose
the king’s peace upon the adventurers who paid him a nominal
allegiance on the other side of the Atlantic. The same suicidal
Assyrian vein of militarism was displayed by the barbarians
who overran the derelict provinces of a decadent Roman Em¬
pire. The Visigoths were overthrown by the Franks and the
Arabs; the smaller fry among the English ‘successor-states’ in
Britain were devoured by Mercia and Wessex; the Merovin¬
gians were brushed aside by the Carolingians, and the Umay-
yads by the ’Abbasids. And this suicidal ending of our classic
example of a 'heroic age’ is characteristic, in some degree, of
the latter end of all the Volkerwanderungen that have overrun
the domains of other decrepit universal states.
There is another variety of militaristic aberration of which
we shall also find the prototype in the Assyrian militarism
when we envisage Assyria, not as an artificially isolated en¬
tity in herself, but in her proper setting as an integral part of
a larger body social which we have called the Babylonic So¬
ciety. In this Babylonic World Assyria was invested, as we
have seen, with the special function of serving as a march
whose primary duty was to defend, not only herself, but also
the rest of the society in which she lived and had her being,
against the predatory barbarian highlanders from the east and
the north and the aggressive Aramaean pioneers of the Syriac
Civilization from the opposite quarters of the compass. In ar¬
ticulating a march of this Assyrian kind out of a previously
THE BURDEN OF NINEVEH 8l
undifferentiated social fabric, a society stands to benefit in all

its members; for while the march itself is stimulated in so far
as it responds successfully to the challenge—which it has now
taken upon itself—of resisting external pressures, the interior—
which the march now shields—is relieved of pressure in a cor¬
responding degree, and is thereby set free to face other chal¬
lenges and accomplish other tasks. This division of labour is
salutary so long as the march continues to direct its specialized
military prowess exclusively to its appointed task of repelling
the external enemy. So long as they are used for this socially
legitimate purpose, the military virtues need not be socially
destructive—even though the necessity of bringing them into
play at all may be a lamentable testimony to the imperfection
of human nature in those generations of men who have been
setting their feet upon the lower rungs of the ladder of Civili¬
zation during these last six thousand years. But these virtues,
such as they are, become fatally transformed into the vice of
Militarism, in the sinister sense, if ever the frontiersmen turn
the arms which they have learnt to use in warfare with the
outsider beyond the pale against the members of their own so¬
ciety whom it is their proper task to defend and not to attack.
The evil of this aberration is not so much that it exposes the
society as a whole to the assaults of the external enemy whom
the frontiersmen have hitherto kept at bay; for the frontiers¬
men seldom turn against their own kith and kin until they have
established so great an ascendancy over their proper adver¬
saries that their hands are free for other mischief and their am¬
bitions fired for aiming at greater objectives. Indeed, when a
march turns and rends the interior of its own society, it usually
manages to hold the external enemy off with its left hand while
it is waging a fratricidal war with its right. The deadly harm
of this misdirection of military energies lies not so much in the
opening of the gates to an alien invader—though this is some¬

times one of the incidental consequences in the end—as in the
betrayal of a trust and in the precipitation of an internecine
conflict between two parties whose natural relation with each
other is to dwell in unity. When a march turns against its own
interior, it is taking the offensive in what is really a civil war;
and it is notorious that civil wars are waged with greater bit¬
terness and ferocity than any others. This explains the momen¬
tousness of the consequences that ultimately followed from the
action of Tiglath-Pileser III in 745 b.c., when he turned his
Assyrian arms against Babylonia instead of continuing to exer¬
cise them exclusively against Nairi and Aram, which were their
legitimate field; and we shall see, from a survey of other in¬
stances which this Assyrian prototype calls to mind, that the
denouement of the ensuing Assyro-Babylonian hundred years’
war, catastrophic as it was, was not peculiar to this particular
case. The aberration of the march which turns against the in¬
terior is, in its very nature, disastrous for the society as a whole;
and it is destructive, above all, to the party which commits the
original act of outrageous behaviour. When a sheep-dog who
has been bred and trained to be the shepherd’s partner lapses
into the ethos and behaviour of the wolves whom it is his duty
to chevy away, and betrays his trust by harrying the sheep on
his own account, he works far worse havoc than any genuine
wolf could work so long as a loyal sheep-dog was snapping at
his flanks; but at the same time it is not the flock that suffers
the most heavily from the catastrophe which follows the sheep¬
dog’s treachery. The flock is decimated but survives; the dog
is destroyed by his outraged master; and the frontiersman who
turns against his own society is dooming himself to inexorable
destruction because he is striking at the source from which his
own life springs. He is like a sword-arm that plunges the blade
which it wields into the body of which it is a member; or like
a woodman who saws off the branch on which he is sitting,

and so comes crashing down with it to the ground while the
mutilated tree-trunk remains still standing.
It was perhaps an intuitive sense of the perversity of this mis¬
direction of energies that moved the Austrasians to protest so
vehemently in a.d. 754 against their war-lord Pepin’s decision
to respond to Pope Stephen’s call to arms against their brethren
the Lombards. The Papacy had turned its eyes towards this
Transalpine Power, and had whetted Pepin’s ambition by
anointing him king in 749 and crowning him on the eve of the
projected Italian expedition, because Austrasia in Pepin s gen¬
eration had distinguished herself by her prowess in serving as
a march of Western Christendom on two fronts: against the
pagan Saxon barbarians who were pushing their way towards
the Rhine from the no-man’s-land of Northern Europe, an
against the Muslim Arab conquerors of North-West Africa
and the Iberian Peninsula who were pressing on across the
Pyrenees. In 754 the Austrasians were invited to divert their
energies from the fields in which they had just been finding
their true mission, and to inflict upon the Lombards in Italy the
fate which Austrasian arms had prevented the Arabs and the
Saxons from inflicting upon the Franks themselves m Gau .
The misgivings of the Austrasian rank-and-file over this Ita lan
adventure were proved by the event to be better justified than
their leader’s appetite for it; for in overriding the objections
of his henchmen King Pepin forged the first link in a chain of
military and political commitments which bound Austrasia to
Italy ever more tightly. Pepin’s Italian campaigns against Ais-
tulf in 755 and 756 led on to Charlemagne’s Italian campaign
against Desiderius in 773-4-notwithstanding the effort of Char¬
lemagne’s mother and Pepin’s widow Queen Bertrade to heal
a breach between Frank and Lombard which King Pepm had
opened against his people’s will. When Bertrade arranged a
marriage between her own and Pepin’s son, who had now suc¬
ceeded his father, and the daughter of Aistulf’s successor Desi-
derius, Charlemagne repudiated his Lombard wife Desiderata
and fulfilled his own father’s ambitions by conquering his wife’s
father’s kingdom outright. But Charlemagne’s seizure of the
Lombard Crown did not dispose of the Italian question or
relieve the Transalpine Power of its ultramontane anxieties. In
extinguishing the independence of the Lombard Kingdom
Charlemagne saddled his own house irrevocably with the bur¬
den of defending and controlling the Papacy; and his protec¬
torate over the Ducatus Romanus involved him in more distant
complications with Lombard principalities and East Roman
outposts in the South of Italy. Even when, on the fourth of the
expeditions which he was compelled to make to Rome, he at¬
tained the apogee of his outward success in being crowned by
the Pope, and acclaimed by the Roman people, as Augustus,
the honour cost him the annoyance of a diplomatic conflict
with the Court of Constantinople which dragged on for more
than ten years.
The true verdict on Charlemagne’s Italian policy is given by
the chronological table of the acts of his reign, which shows
how these ultramontane commitments repeatedly diverted him
—and this often at critical moments-from his major military
task of prosecuting the Great Saxon War. After throwing
down the gauntlet to the Saxons by marching into the heart of
their country, and hewing down the Irminsul, in 772, Charle¬
magne disappeared beyond the Alps during 773 and 774, and so
left the way open for the Saxons in the latter year to take re¬
prisals on Hessen. Thereafter the would-be ‘knock-out blow’
of 775-6 had to be suspended in the spring of the latter year
while the smiter of the Saxons went off on a second ultramon¬
tane expedition to put down a rebellion raised by Hrodgaud,
the Lombard Duke of Friuli. In the middle of the next and
most formidable phase of the war, in which the Saxons were

led for eight years (777-85) by Widukind-a captain whose
strategy was the offensive defensive—Charlemagne had to pay
the third visit to Italy, and second to Rome, of his reign; and
the lull in the Saxon War which followed the submission of
Widukind in 785 gave no rest to Austrasian arms, for the year
■787 saw Charlemagne pay his third visit to Rome, lead an in¬
conclusive expedition against the South Lombard Duchy of
Benevento, and impose his authority by a military demonstra¬
tion upon the Lombards’ old friends, and his own restive vas¬
sals, the Bavarians. The fourth and last phase of the Saxon War,
in which the conquered but uncowed barbarians made a des¬
perate and long-drawn-out effort to throw off the Austrasian
yoke with the aid of the Frisians (nitebantur a.d. 792-804), was
in progress during Charlemagne’s fourth visit to Rome, and
fifth to Italy, in 800-801.
This war of attrition against the Saxons grievously exhausted
the Carolingian Power. The exhaustion declared itself in the
break-up of the Carolingian Empire on the morrow of Charle¬
magne’s death, and in the Scandinavian revanche for the Sax¬
ons’ sufferings-a counter-attack which was opened even before
the Austrasian conqueror of the Saxons had departed this life.
It must also be remembered that the Saxon front beyond the
Rhine was not the only frontier of Western Christendom for
which Austrasia was responsible; she was likewise the warden
of the Arab frontier beyond the Pyrenees; and, when Charle¬
magne overthrew the Lombard Kingdom and reduced the
Bavarians to obedience, he inherited from his vanquished adver¬
saries the wardenship of a third frontier, the Avar front beyond
the Styrian Alps. It may have been inevitable that in the second
year of his deadly duel with Widukind Charlemagne should
have been drawn away into the Transpyrenean expedition
which ended so unfortunately at Roncesvalles; but, with a
Transpyrenean as well as a Transrhenane front to hold, and

with disaffection always smouldering in Aquitaine, it is evident
that Charlemagne could not afford in any case to enter into
new commitments on the Italian side of the Alps; and his Ital¬
ian policy became suicidal when it was combined, as it was,
with an ambitious forward movement on both the Transalpine
fronts which the great Austrasian militarist had inherited from
his forebears. It was the wantonly imposed burden of Charle¬
magne’s five Italian expeditions that aggravated to the breaking-
point the load which weighed upon Austrasia’s back.
If Charlemagne broke Austrasia’s back by turning her arms
against the Lombard and Bavarian interior of a nascent West¬
ern Christendom when the whole of her strength was required
for her terrific struggle with the Saxons beyond her Rhenish
pale, Timur, in like fashion, broke the back of his own Trans-
oxama by squandering in aimless expeditions into Iran and ’Iraq
and India and Anatolia and Syria the slender reserves of Trans-
oxaman strength which ought to have been concentrated upon
Timur’s proper mission of imposing his peace on the Eurasian
Nomads.
In the course of nineteen years (a.d. 1362-80) of strenuous
campaigning he had repulsed the attempts of the Chaghatay
Nomads to reconquer the Transoxanian oases; assumed the of¬
fensive in his turn against the foiled invaders on their native
ranges in ‘Mughalistan’; and rounded off his own dominions in
the Eurasian march of the Iranic World by liberating the oases
of Khwarizm on the Lower Oxus from the Nomads of JujI’s
appanage. Upon the completion of this great task in a.d. 1380
Limur had a greater prize within his reach-no less a prize than
the succession to the Eurasian Empire of Chingis Khan-for in
Timur’s generation the Eurasian Nomads were in retreat on all
sectors of the long frontier between the Desert and the Sown.
hile Timur was winning his victory over the hordes of
‘Mughalistan’ and Qipchaq on the sector between the Pamirs

and the Caspian, the Moldavians and Lithuanians and Cossacks
were cutting short the appanage of Juji at its opposite extrem¬
ity in the great western bay of the Steppe between the Iron
Gates of the Danube and the Cataracts of the Dniepr; the Mus¬
covites were shaking off the yoke of the Qipchaq horde; and
the Chinese were driving out the mongol Khaqans—the senior
branch of Chingis Khan’s house, and the nominal overlords of
all the Chingisid appanages—from Qubilay’s capital at Peking
into a no-man’s-land beyond the outer face of the Great Wall
from which these barbarian intruders had originally come. In
every quarter the Nomads were on the run, and the next chap¬
ter in the history of Eurasia was to be a race between the resur¬
gent sedentary peoples round about for the prize of Chingis
heritage. In this competition the Moldavians and Lithuanians
were too remote to be in the running; the Muscovites were
wedded to their forests and the Chinese to their fields; the Cos¬
sacks and the Transoxanians were the only competitors who
had succeeded in making themselves at home on the Steppes
without uprooting the sedentary foundations of their own way
of life. Each in their own way, they had acquired something
of the strength of Nomadism and had combined this with the
strength of a sedentary civilization. To a sharp-eyed observer
in a d 1380 it might have seemed as though the victory in the
race for the dominion of Eurasia must lie between these two
runners; and at that moment the Transoxanian competitor had,
to all appearance, by far the better chance, for, besides being
stronger in himself and nearer to the heart of the Steppe, he
was also the first in the field, while, as the recognized champion
of the Sunnah, he had potential partisans among the sedentaiy
Muslim communities who were the outposts of Islam on the
opposite coasts of the Steppe: in Qazan and Knm on the one
hand, and in Kansu and Shensi on the other.
For an instant Timur appeared to appreciate his opportunity

and to grasp at it with determination. The civil war between
rival sections of the Qipchaq horde, which had permitted
Timur to conquer Khwarizm and the Muscovites to assert their
independence, was duly taken advantage of by Timur for a
more ambitious purpose than the mere acquisition of a single
border province. He intervened in the internal affairs of Qip¬
chaq by giving his support to one of the rival pretenders, To-
qatmysh; it was thanks to Timur’s aid that Toqatmysh was able
in the course of the years 1378-82 to unite the whole of Juji’s
appanage under his own leadership, reduce the Muscovites to
obedience again by taking and burning Moscow itself, and in¬
flict a heavy defeat upon the Lithuanians. All this was done by
Toqatmysh as Timur’s vassal, and the effect was to make Ti¬
mur master, directly or indirectly, of the whole western half
of the Eurasian Steppe with its surrounding sedentary depend¬
encies, from the Irtish to the Dniepr and from the Pamirs to
the Urals. At this juncture, however, the Transoxanian con¬
queror of the Eurasian no-man’s-land suddenly turned right¬
about, directed his arms towards the interior of the Iranic
World, and devoted the remaining twenty-four years of his
life to a series of barren and destructive campaigns in this quar¬
ter. Even when Toqatmysh, emboldened by seeing his suzerain
fly off at a tangent, unintentionally drew him back into his
proper field through an act of audacious aggression, Timur ob¬
stinately resumed his new course as soon as he had disposed of
the nuisance in Qipchaq in a winter campaign across the Steppes
which was the most brilliant and characteristic tour de force in
the Transoxanian captain’s whole history.
A brief exposition of the annals of the last twenty-four years
of Timur’s life will show how persistently, throughout that
span of nearly a quarter of a century, he rejected an oppor¬
tunity which he had held in the hollow of his hand at the mo-
THE BURDEN OF NINEVEH °V
ment of transition from the first to the second phase of his

career.
Timur spent the seven years 1381-7 in conquering Iran and
Transcaucasia, save for a single punitive expedition in 1383-4
against a still recalcitrant Chaghatay Khan in ‘Mughalistan. He
did not even take warning from a brush between his own
troops and Toqatmysh’s which occurred in 1385 in Azerbaijan;
and at the beginning of 1388 he was in Fars, on the point of
rounding off his conquest of the Iranian Plateau, when he was
urgently recalled to Samarqand by Toqatmysh’s invasion of
Khwarizm and Transoxania. His crushing victory over Toqat-
mysh at Urtapa, on the opposite coast of the Qipchaq Steppe,
in 1391 replaced in Timur’s hands the opportunity which he
had held in 1380 and had neglected since 1381. This time it was
in his power to make himself the direct master of Qipchaq an
all its dependencies. Moreover, after his triumphal return to
Samarqand from Qipchaq at the beginning of 1392, he was able
to stamp out the last embers of revolt in ‘Mughalistan’ and to
establish his suzerainty definitively over the Chaghatay horde.
Eurasia now lay at his feet; but instead of stooping to pick up
the prize he rode off again, that summer, in the opposite direc¬
tion, made straight for Fars-that is to say, for the point on his
course at which he had been compelled to desist from the con¬
quest of South-Western Asia in 1388-and proceeded systemati¬
cally with the subjugation of ’Iraq and Armenia and Georgia.
In the course of this famous ‘Five Years’ Campaign (July
!392-July 1396) Timur once again was drawn, in spite of him¬
self, out of his intended course by a fresh incursion of Toqat-
mysh into Transcaucasia in the spring of 1395. Timur’s counter¬
stroke carried him across the Caucasus and the Terek and the
Steppes into Muscovy; but in 1396 he retraced his steps from
Qipchaq to South-Western Asia, and returned to Samarqand
across Iran.
9© WAR AND CIVILIZATION
From the summer of 1396 to the spring of 1398 Timur rested

at Samarqand from his devastating labours; but this pause was
not followed by a consolidation or extension of his hold upon
Eurasia. Having now completed the pulverization of the heart
of the Iranic World (of which he was himself a child), he set
himself next to harry, in turn, its south-eastern and north¬
western extremities, where the TaghlaqI princes of Hindustan
and the Osmanli princes of Rum were at that time extending
the Iranic domain at the expense of the Hindu World and Or¬
thodox Christendom respectively. Timur’s amirs objected to
crossing the Hindu Kush and attacking their own Turkish
kinsmen and co-religionists in India as strongly as the hench¬
men of Pepin had once objected, in similar circumstances, to
crossing the Alps and attacking their Lombard kinsmen in
Italy; but Timur, like Pepin, made his own will prevail. The
Indian campaign kept him occupied from the spring of 1398 to
the spring of 1399; and by the autumn of the latter year he was
off again on what was destined to be the most famous, though
it was not really the most brilliant, chapter of his military
career: a second five years’ campaign which included his en¬
counter with the Maghrib! philosopher Ibn Khaldun at Damas¬
cus in 1401 and his defeat and capture of the Ottoman Sultan
Bayezid Yilderim in 1402.
Returning to Samarqand in the July of 1404, Timur was on
the war-path again by November; and now at last, for the first
time in twenty-three years, his face was deliberately set in an
auspicious direction; for his objective, this time, was China-
and although it may be doubted, in the light of his record in
outh-Western Asia, whether he would have repeated the Mon¬
gols’ feat of conquering China outright-a task which it had
taken even the Mongols seventy years (a.d. 1207-77) to com-
plete-nevertheless this latest enterprise of Timur’s, had he
lived to carry it out, might have had enduring consequences of
historical importance; for even a passing raid on China might

have left Timur in permanent possession of the eastern sectors
of the southern border of the Eurasian Steppe from the Tarim
Basin to Manchuria; and that would have placed the whole of
the Steppe in his power. At this point, however, we pass into
the realm of conjecture; for even a militarist who was favoured
with Timur’s lucky star could not throw away twenty-three
years with impunity. On his China campaign he had marched
no farther eastward than Utrar before Death overtook him.
Timur’s self-stultification is a supreme example of the sui¬
cidalness of Militarism, as will appear from a comparison be¬
tween his fiasco and Charlemagne’s.
In both cases the attempt of the march to conquer the inte¬
rior was ephemeral—and indeed it is seldom that a relatively
backward community does succeed in assimilating to itself by
the crude expedient of military conquest another community
which is in advance of it on the same path of civilization. Like
the Transoxanian domination which Timur imposed by force
of arms upon Iran and ’Iraq, the Austrasian domination which
Charlemagne imposed upon Lombardy and Bavaria faded away
after the conqueror’s death. Yet the effects of Charlemagne’s
militarism were not altogether transient; for his empire held to¬
gether in some fashion for three-quarters of a century after his
own hand was removed; and the destinies of its several parts
were permanently modified through their union into a single
body social which lived on, in the shape of a Respublica Chris¬
tiana, long after the evaporation of the military force by which
the union had originally been brought about. By contrast, Ti¬
mur’s empire was not only shorter-lived than Charlemagne’s
but was also without any social after-effects of a positive kind.
West of the Caspian Gates it dissolved in a.d. 1405 upon the
news of Timur’s death; in Khurasan and Transoxania it broke
up into weak and warring fragments after Shah Rukh’s death.
in a.d. 1446; and the only traceable after-effect is wholly nega¬

tive. In sweeping away everything that it found in its path, in
order to rush headlong to its own destruction, Timur’s imperi¬
alism simply created a political and social vacuum in South-
Western Asia; and this vacuum eventually drew the ’Osmanlis
and the Safawis into a collision which dealt the stricken Iranic
Society its death-blow.
Again, Charlemagne’s diversion of Austrasian military ener¬
gies from the frontiers of Western Christendom to the interior
was fatal to Austrasia herself without proving equally fatal to
the society of which Austrasia was a part. The expansion of the
Western Christendom at the expense of the continental Euro¬
pean barbarians was eventually taken up and carried on, from
the line at which Charlemagne had come to a halt, by the de¬
scendants of Charlemagne’s Saxon victims, and her expansion
at the expense of the Syriac World in the Iberian Peninsula by
a number of local Western Christian principalities, several of
which were direct ‘successor-states’ of the Carolingian Empire.
On both these fronts the price that the Western Christendom
had to pay for Charlemagne’s militarism was a pause which
lasted for rather less than two centuries, and which was then
followed by three centuries (circa a.d. 975-1275) of further
advance. On the other hand Timur’s militarism deprived the
Iranic Society for ever of its Promised Land in Eurasia.
The Iranic Society’s forfeiture of the heritage of the Nomad
World declared itself first on the plane of religion. Throughout
the four centuries ending in Timur’s generation Islam had been
progressively establishing its hold over the sedentary peoples
round the coasts of the Eurasian Steppe and had been captivat¬
ing the Nomads themselves whenever they trespassed out of
the Desert on to the Sown. In the tenth century of the Chris¬
tian Era, when the military and political power of the Muslim
sovereigns of the ’Abbasid Caliphate was in dissolution, their
religion was conquering the sedentary Turkish peoples on the

Middle Volga and in the oases of the Tarim Basin and the No¬
mad Turkish followers of the Saljuq and the Ilek Khans on the
Transoxanian fringe of the Steppe between the Sea of Aral and
Lake Balkash. Even in the last and greatest eruption of the
post-’Abbasid Volkerwanderung, when the Steppe was con¬
vulsed to its depths and discharged upon Dar-al-lslam a horde
of Nomads who had never been touched by the radiation of
the Islamic culture and who were prejudiced against Islam,
when they encountered it, by their tincture of Nestorian Chris¬
tianity, the injury which Islam sustained from the spasmodic
persecution to which it was subjected by the early Mongol
Khaqans was more than counterbalanced by the unintentional
service which it received from the Mongols’ policy of deliber¬
ately intermixing the peoples and cultures of their vast and
heterogeneous empire. It was thanks to these pagan Nomad
war-lords that Islam was propagated into China—and this not
only into the north-western provinces adjoining the older Is¬
lamic domain in the Tarim Basin, but also into the new prov¬
ince of Yunnan in the far south-west, which was carved out of
a barbarian no-man’s-land and added to China by Mongol arms.
Thereafter, when at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries of the Christian Era the three western appanages of
the Mongol Empire—the house of Hulagu in Iran and the house
of Juji on the Qipchaq Steppe and the house of Chaghatay in
Transoxania and Zungaria—were converted to Islam one after
another, it looked as though nothing could now prevent Islam
from becoming the religion of all Eurasia; and, by the time
when Timur arose as the champion of the Sunnah in Trans¬
oxania, a Muslim ‘Diaspora’ which had seeded itself round the
western and southern coasts of the Steppe had prepared the
ground—as we have noticed already—for him to reap the har¬
vest of a Pan-Eurasian Islamic empire. It is the more significant
that the propagation of Islam in Eurasia, which had made such

headway down to Timur’s time, came to a dead halt thereafter.
The only subsequent gain that Islam made in this quarter was
the conversion of the Turkish Khanate of Western Siberia at
some date shortly before the Cossack conquest in a.d. 1582; and
this success in one remote and backward corner was little for
Islam to boast of in a generation which saw another of the
‘higher religions’ captivate all the rest of the Eurasian Nomads
who had hitherto remained in their primitive paganism.
The outstanding religious event in Eurasia at the turn of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era was
the conversion of the Mongols (in a.d. 1576—7) and their west¬
erly kinsmen the Calmucks (circa a.d. 1620) to the Lamaistic
form of Mahayanian Buddhism; and this astonishing triumph
of a fossilized relic of the religious life of the long extinct In¬
die culture gives some measure of the extent to which the pres¬
tige of Islam had fallen in the estimation of the Eurasian No¬
mads during the two centuries that had elapsed since Timur’s
day.
On the political plane the Iranic culture which Timur had
first championed and then betrayed proved equally bankrupt.
The sedentary societies which did, in the end, perform the feat
of taming the Eurasian Nomadism politically were the Russian
branch of the Orthodox Christian Society and the Chinese
branch of the Far Eastern; and the sentence of servitude which
Fate had pronounced upon the Nomads when Timur made his
winter-passage across the Steppe and overthrew Toqatmysh at
Urtapa in a.d. 1391 was never executed by Transoxanian hands.
It was confirmed when, in the middle of the seventeenth cen¬
tury, the Cossack servants of Muscovy and the Manchu mas¬
ters of China ran into each other as they were feeling their way
in opposite directions round the northern edge of the Steppe,
and fought their first battle for dominion over Eurasia in the
neighbourhood of Chingis Khan’s ancestral pastures in the

upper basin of the Amur. The partition of Eurasia and the sub¬
jugation of its ancient Nomad occupants by the same pair of
competitors was completed a century later when the Emperor
Ch’ien Lung (imperabat a.d. 1735-96) broke the power of the
Zungar Calmucks in a.d. 1755 and gave asylum to the already
broken Torgut Calmuck refugees from the dominions of the
Tsar in a.d. 1771* Therewith the latest tidal wave of the Eura¬
sian Nomadism was spent; and when the Muscovite and the
Manchu Power had divided the allegiance of the Qazaqs—the
flotsam and jetsam of the latest wave but one, who were now
drifting sluggishly over the eastern portion of the Qipchaq
Steppe, between the Irtish and the Yaik—the whole of Eurasia,
up to the northern outskirts of the Transoxanian oases, found
itself under either Russian or Chinese control.
Nor did the injury inflicted by Timur’s militarism upon the
Iranic World, including the conqueror’s own Transoxanian
homeland, stop short at the loss of a potential field for expan¬
sion across and around the Eurasian Steppe. The conclusive
condemnation of the destructive militarism which possessed
Timur during the last twenty-four years of his career is to be
found in the fact that, besides being barren in itself, it actually
led in the fulness of Time-as its consequences worked them¬
selves out in the third and fourth generation-to the undoing of
the constructive work to which Timur had devoted himself
for nineteen years before he ran amok in a.d. 1381. The liber¬
ator of the nascent Iranic Society in Transoxania spent the rest
of his life in so recklessly wearing out the energies which he
had first mobilized against a Nomad intruder that the world
which he had made safe against the hordes of Chaghatay and
Juji found itself exposed, within little more than a hundred
years after the death of the liberator-turned-militarist, to a re¬
currence of the Nomad peril in the shape of the Uzbegs; and
in this emergency the epigoni of Timur’s house were impotent

-heirs, as they were, to the debilitating social legacy of Ti¬
mur’s military excesses—to repeat their ancestor’s original feat.
The Uzbeg drive’ at the heart of the Iranic World was even¬
tually arrested, not by any Timurid prince of Farghana or
Khurasan, but by the new Safawi Power of Shah Isma’il; and
even Shah Isma’il’s arms, which did effectively bar the Uzbegs’
farther progress, were unable to drive the intruders right back
into the Eurasian no-man’s-land out of which they had issued.
With his relatively distant base of operations in Azerbaijan and
with his grandiose ambitions on the west—ambitions which in¬
volved him in an unequal contest with the ’Osmanlis—his power
to play the liberator on the eastern front was limited; and after
expelling the Uzbegs once for all from Khurasan he was com¬
pelled in the end to leave them in permanent possession of
Transoxania.
Thus, a century and a half after the year in which Timur
had girded himself to liberate his country from the dominion
of the Chaghatay horde, Transoxania fell under the yoke of an¬
other swarm of Nomads, from the back-of-beyond, who were
even more barbarous than the hateful and contemptible ‘Jatah’;
and under this yoke the former Eurasian march of the Iranic
World, which had once spread her terror as puissantly as As¬
syria, was destined to lie prostrate and passive for the next
three hundred and fifty years, until, in the third quarter of the
nineteenth century of the Christian Era, the long-ground-down
peasantry of the Transoxanian oases obtained at last the allevi¬
ation of exchanging an Uzbeg for a Russian master.
It is a curious reflection that, if Timur had not turned his
back on Eurasia and his arms against Iran in a.d. 1381, the pres¬
ent relations between Transoxania and Russia might have been
the inverse of what they actually are. In those hypothetical cir¬
cumstances Russia to-day might have found herself included in
an empire of much the same extent as the area of the Soviet

Union but with quite a different centre of gravity—an Iranic
Empire in which Samarqand would be ruling Moscow instead
of Moscow ruling Samarqand. This imaginary picture of an
alternative course of Iranic history may appear outlandish be¬
cause the actual course has been taking an altogether different
direction for the last four hundred years and more. At least as
strange a picture will unfold itself before our mind’s eye if we
plot out an alternative course of Western history in which the
consequences of Charlemagne’s militarism for our world are
imagined to have been as utterly disastrous as those of Timur’s
militarism actually were for his. On this analogy we shall have
to picture Austrasia being submerged by the Magyars and
Neustria by the Vikings in the tenth century, and the heart
of the Carolingian Empire remaining thereafter under this bar¬
barian domination until in the fourteenth century the ’Osman-
lis step in to impose the lesser evil of an alien civilization upon
these derelict marches of Western Christendom.
Thus, besides forfeiting a Promised Land, Timur undid his
own work of liberating his native country; but the greatest of
all his acts of destruction was committed against himself. He
has succeeded in making his name immortal at the price of eras¬
ing from the minds of Posterity all memory of the deeds for
which he might have been remembered for good. To how
many people in either Christendom or Dar-al-Islam to-day does
Timur’s name call up the image of a champion of Civilization
against Barbarism, who led the clergy and people of his coun¬
try to a hard-won victory at the end of a nineteen-years-long
struggle for independence? To the vast majority of those to
whom the name of Timur Lenk or Tamerlane means anything
at all, it commemorates a militarist who perpetrated as many
horrors in the span of twenty-four years as had been perpe¬
trated in a century by a succession of Assyrian kings from
Tiglath-Pileser III to Asshurbanipal inclusive. We think of the

monster who razed Isfara’in to the ground in 1381; built two
thousand prisoners into a living mound, and then bricked them
over, at Sabzawar in 1383; piled 5,000 human heads into mina¬
rets at Zirih in the same year; cast his Luri prisoners alive over
precipices in 1386; massacred 70,000 people, and piled the
heads of the slain into minarets, at Isfahan in 1387; massacred
the garrison of Takrit, and piled their heads into minarets, in
1393; massacred 100,000 prisoners at Delhi in 1398; buried alive
the 4,000 Christian soldiers of the garrison of Sivas after their
capitulation in 1400; built twenty towers of skulls in Syria in
1400 and 1401; and dealt with Baghdad in 1401 as he had dealt
fourteen years earlier with Isfahan. In minds which know him
only through such deeds, Timur has caused himself to be con¬
founded with the ogres of the Steppe—a Chingis and an Attila
and the like-against whom he had spent the better half of his
life in waging a Holy War. The crack-brained megalomania of
the homicidal madman whose one idea is to impress the imagi¬
nation of Mankind with a sense of his military power by a
hideous abuse of it is brilliantly conveyed in the hyperboles
which the English poet Marlowe has placed in the mouth of
his Tamburlaine:
I hold the Fates bound fast in yron chaines,

And with my hand turne Fortune’s wheel about,
And sooner shall the Sun fall from his Spheare,
Than Tamburlaine be slaine or overcome . . .
The God of war resignes his roume to me,
Meaning to make me Generali of the world;
Jove, viewing me in armes, lookes pale and wan,
Fearing my power should pull him from his throne.
Where ere I come the fatall sisters sweat,
And griesly death by running to and fro,
To doo their ceassles homag to my sword . . .
Millions of soules sit on the bankes of Styx,
Waiting the back returne of Charon’s boat,
Hell and Elysian swarme with ghosts of men,
That I have sent from sundry foughten fields,
To spread my fame through hell and up to heaven . . .
Nor am I made Arch-monark of the world,
Crown’d and invested by the hand of Jove,
For deeds of bounty or nobility;
But since I exercise a greater name,
The Scourge of God and terrour of the world,
I must apply my selfe to fit those tearmes,
In war, in blood, in death, in crueltie . . .
I will persist a terrour to the world,
Making the Meteors, that like armed men
Are seene to march upon the towers of heaven,
Run tilting round about the firmament,
And breake their burning Lances in the aire,
For honor of my woondrous victories.
In analyzing the careers of Timur and Charlemagne and the

kings of Assyria from Tiglath-Pileser III to Asshurbanipal, we
have observed the same phenomenon in all three cases. The
military prowess which a society develops among its frontiers¬
men for its defence against external enemies undergoes a sinis¬
ter transformation into the moral malady of Militarism when
it is diverted from its proper field in the no-man’s-land beyond
the pale and is turned against the frontiersmen’s own brethren
in the interior of a world which it is their mission to protect
and not to devastate. A number of other examples of this de¬
structive social evil will readily occur to our minds.
We shall think of Mercia turning against the other English
‘successor-states’ of the Roman Empire in Britain the arms
which she had sharpened in the performance of her original
function as the English march against Wales; of the Plantag-
enet Kingdom of England attempting in the Hundred Years’
War to conquer the sister Kingdom of France instead of at¬
tending to her proper business of enlarging the bounds of their
IOO WAR AND CIVILIZATION
common mother, Latin Christendom, at the expense of ‘the

Celtic Fringe’; and of the Norman King Roger of Sicily turn¬
ing his military energies to the extension of his dominions in
Central Italy—at the expense of the South Lombard duchies
and the Holy Roman Empire and the States of the Church—
instead of devoting himself to carrying on his forebears’ work
of enlarging the bounds of Western Christendom in the Medi¬
terranean at the expense of Orthodox Christendom and Dar-
al-Islam. In the Mexic World we see the Aztecs warring down
the Toltecs, to whom they owed their own initiation into the
Mexic culture, instead of confining themselves to their proper
task of guarding the northern march against the unconverted
Chichimecs of the wilderness; in the Andean World we see the
Incas bending their energies to the subjugation of their low¬
land neighbours in the coast-lands and their highland neigh¬
bours in Ecuador, who were co-heirs with them in the heritage
of the Andean Civilization, while they made little headway
against the dangerous savages of Amazonia or the valiant bar¬
barians of Southern Chile and the Pampas, whom it was their
mission to keep at bay. In like fashion the Mycenaean outposts
of the Minoan Civilization on the European mainland misused
the prowess which they had acquired in holding their own
against the continental barbarians, in order to turn and rend
their mother Crete; and the Macedonians and the Romans,
whose function in the Hellenic World was to serve as wardens
of the marches against the same barbarians, committed in their
turn the same crime as the Mycenaeans when they contended
with their neighbours, and finally with each other, for the illegi¬
timate prize of a Pan-Hellenic hegemony. In the Sinic World
the part of Rome was played by Ts’in, the western march
against the barbarian highlanders of Shensi and Shansi and
against the Nomads of the Eurasian Steppe, when her princes
stepped into an arena which had formed itself in the interior
THE BURDEN OF NINEVEH IOI
and there eventually delivered the ‘knock-out blow’ in the

struggle between the contending states.
In the Egyptiac World the classic Southern March in the
section of the Nile Valley immediately below the First Cataract
trained itself in arms, in the execution of its duty of damming
back the Nubian barbarians up-river, only to turn right-about,
direct its arms down-river against the Egyptiac communities in
the interior, and take advantage of its military superiority in
order to establish by brute force the United Kingdom of the
Two Crowns. This act of Militarism, which was at once the
making and the marring of the Egyptiac Civilization, has been
depicted by its perpetrator, with all the frankness of self-com¬
placency, in one of the earliest of the Egyptiac records that
have come into the hands of our modern Western archaeolo¬
gists. The palette of Narmer portrays the triumphant return of
the Upper Egyptian war-lord from the conquest of Lower
Egypt. Swollen to a superhuman stature, the royal conqueror
marches behind a strutting file of standard-bearers towards a
double row of decapitated enemy corpses, while below, in the
image of a bull, he tramples upon a fallen adversary and batters
down the walls of a fortified town. The accompanying script
is believed to enumerate a booty of 120,000 human captives,
400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 sheep and goats.
In this gruesome work of an archaic Egyptiac art we have
the whole tragedy of Militarism as it has been acted over and
over again since Narmer’s time by the Sennacheribs and Tamer-
lanes and Charlemagnes of twenty different civilizations down
to our own militarists in the Western World of to-day. Per¬
haps the most poignant of all the performances of this tragedy
during its run of some six thousand years up to date is that of
which Athens was guilty when she transformed herself from a
‘liberator of Hellas’ into a ‘tyrant city’ by misusing for the op¬
pression of her Hellenic allies and prot6g6es the naval power
with which she had armed herself so short a time before in

order to save herself—and rescue all Hellas in the act—from the
aggression of the Achaemenidae. This Athenian aberration
brought upon the whole of Hellas, as well as upon Athens her¬
self, the never-retrieved disaster of 431-404 b.c. And, if an
Athens under arms succumbed to so gross a sin, with such
fatal consequences, can any of those military and naval Powers
of our modern Western World who surpass Athens in arms as
signally as they fall short of her in the arts, feel sure of pre¬
serving their own moral integrity?
In all the examples of which we have just been reminding
ourselves in a cursory review, the suicidalness of Militarism is
as evident as it is in the three classic cases with which we have
dealt at greater length; and it comes out most strikingly of all
where the fatal change of front has not been exclusively devas¬
tating in its effects, but has also been incidentally constructive.
The diversion of Athenian and Macedonian arms from the ex¬
ternal frontier towards the interior of the Hellenic World was
disastrous for Hellas even though the Athenian and Macedo¬
nian militarists were doing something to provide the Hellenic
Society with the political world order of which it then stood
in need. The corresponding changes of front which were made
by Rome and Ts’in and the Incas were likewise disastrous to
their respective societies in spite of the fact that in each of
these cases the militarist community did succeed, through the
triumph of its militarism, in providing its society with a uni¬
versal state. And Narmer’s change of front from up-stream to
down-stream in the Nile Valley had a sinister effect upon the
subsequent course of Egyptiac history even though it resulted
in the establishment of the United Kingdom. In the palette of
Narmer we have the first evidence of that brutal vein in the
Egyptiac ethos which so soon arrested the growth of the
Egyptiac Civilization. The descendants of the Lower Egyptian
THE BURDEN OF NINEVEH io3
peasants whom Narmer had slaughtered or enslaved were those

unfortunate human beings who were converted into ‘man¬
power’ by the Pyramid-Builders.
The military field which we have been surveying in this
chapter is illuminating for the study of the fatal chain of ‘sur¬
feit,’ ‘outrage,’ and ‘disaster,’ because military skill and prowess
are edged tools which are apt to inflict fatal injuries upon those
who venture to wield them if there is even the slightest clumsi¬
ness or misjudgement in their use. When an individual or a
government or a community that has command of military
power mistakes the limits of the field within which this power
can be used with effect, or misconceives the nature of the ob¬
jectives which it is possible to attain by means of it, the disas¬
trousness of this aberration can hardly fail to make itself con¬
spicuous through the seriousness of the practical consequences.
But what is palpably true of military action is also true of other
human activities in less hazardous fields where the train of
gunpowder that leads from ‘surfeit’ through ‘outrage’ to ‘disas¬
ter’ is not so explosive. Whatever the human faculty, or the
sphere of its exercise, may be, the presumption that because a
faculty has proved equal to the accomplishment of a limited
task within its proper field it may therefore be counted upon
to produce some inordinate effect in a different set of circum¬
stances is never anything but an intellectual and a moral aber¬
ration and never leads to anything but certain disaster.
CHAPTER VI
The Intoxication of Victory
One of the more general forms in which the tragedy of ‘sur¬

feit, outrage, and disaster’ presents itself is in the intoxication
of victory—whether the struggle in which the fatal prize is
won be a war of arms or a conflict of spiritual forces. Both
variants of this drama may be illustrated from the history of
Rome: the intoxication of a military victory from the break¬
down of the Republic in the second century b.c., the intoxica¬
tion of a spiritual victory from the breakdown of the Papacy
in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era.
The demoralization to which the governing class in the Ro¬
man Republic succumbed at the close of half a century of
titanic waifare (220-168 b.c.), which had begun with the ter¬
rible ordeal of the Hannibalic War and had ended in the con¬
quest of the World, is caustically described by a contemporary
Greek observer who happened to be one of the victims.
The first result of the friendship between Polybius and Scipio

Aemilianus was a dynamic enthusiasm for higher things which
took possession of them both and which inspired them with the
ambition to win moral distinction and to compete victoriously in
this field with their contemporaries. The great prize on which
they had thus set their hearts would have been difficult to attain in
ordinary circumstances; but unhappily in the Rome of that gen¬
eration the standard of the competition was lowered by the gen¬
eral demoralization of Society. Some were ‘all out’ for women
THE INTOXICATION OF VICTORY 105
others for unnatural vice, and many for ‘shows’ and drink and all
the extravagance for which ‘shows’ and drink gave occasion. These
were all vices for which the Greeks had a weakness, and the
Romans had caught this infirmity from them instantaneously dur¬
ing the Third Romano-Macedonian War. So violent and so uncon¬
trolled was the passion for these vices that had overcome the
younger generation of Romans that it was quite a common thing
to buy a boy-favourite for a talent and a jar of caviare for three
hundred drachmae—behaviour which drew from Marcus Cato in
a public speech the indignant exclamation that the demoralization
of Roman Society was glaringly exposed in the mere fact of hand¬
some boys fetching a higher price than land, and jars of caviare
than live-stock. If it is asked why this social malady ‘lighted up’
at this particular time, two reasons can be given in answer. The
first reason was that, with the overthrow of the Kingdom of
Macedon, the Romans felt that there was no Power now left in
the World that could challenge their own supremacy. The sec¬
ond reason was that the material display, both private and public,
of life in Rome had been enormously enhanced by the removal to
Rome of properties from Macedonia.1
This was the moral pass to which the Roman governing class
had been brought by the overwhelming victory which had de¬
scended upon the Republic after years of agony in which she
had been tottering on the verge of an abyss. The first reaction
of a generation which had lived through this bewildering ex¬
perience was a blind presumption that a victor s irresistible
material power was the key to a solution of all human prob¬
lems, and that the only conceivable end of Man was an un¬
bridled enjoyment of the grossest pleasures which this power
could place within his grasp. The victors did not realize that
this very state of mind bore witness to the moral defeat which
a militarily vanquished Hannibal had succeeded in inflicting
upon them. They did not perceive that the world in which
they passed for victors was a world in ruins, and that their own
1 Polybius: An Oecumenical History, Book XXXI, ch. 15.

io6 WAR AND CIVILIZATION
ostensibly victorious Roman Republic was the most sorely

stricken of all the prostrate states of which this ruined world
was made up. In this moral aberration they wandered in the
wilderness for more than a hundred years; and in this awful
century they inflicted one calamity after another upon a world
which their victory had placed at their mercy, and the greatest
calamities of all upon themselves.
Even in the military coin which was their own chosen cur¬
rency their bankruptcy soon became manifest. The hard-won
Roman triumphs over a Hannibal and a Perseus were followed
by a series of humiliating Roman reverses at the hands of an¬
tagonists who were utterly outmatched by Rome in military
strength: the broken, disarmed, and almost defenceless Car¬
thage upon whom the Roman Government passed a cold¬
blooded sentence of annihilation in 149 b.c.; the barbarian Nu-
mantines who defied all Roman efforts to subjugate them from
G3 to *335 the enslaved and expatriated Orientals who broke
out of their ergastula on the Sicilian plantations in 135 and 104;
the mutinous gladiators at whose head Spartacus ranged as
freely over Italy from 73 to 71 as Hannibal himself had ranged
from 218 to 211; the ‘Citizens of the Sun’ who put their faith
in Aristonicus of Pergamum and held out against the power of
Rome for three years (132-130) in the strength of their belief
in the coming of a new dispensation; and the rebellious native
princes—a Jugurtha and a Mithradates—who repudiated their
allegiance and taxed their outraged suzerain’s strength to the
uttermost before she succeeded in bringing them to book.
The reason why Rome thus covered herself with military
dishonour on the morrow of a military triumph was because
during this century her officers were leading soldiers who had
no longer anything to gain by victory against an enemy who,
on his side, had no longer anything to hope for from laying
down his arms. Both the mobilization of the Italian peasantry
and the subjugation of the barbarians and the Orientals were

now being exploited heartlessly for the pecuniary profit of the
Roman governing class. The provinces were being drained of
their inanimate wealth and their human inhabitants in order to
provide lucrative contracts for Roman business men and cheap
man-power for Roman senators’ cattle-ranches and plantations;
and the land which was being stocked with this alien slave-
labour in order to multiply the fortunes of a small class of al¬
ready rich men was Italian land which was being placed at the
disposition of these capitalists by the impoverishment and evic¬
tion of the former peasant proprietors. The nucleus of the lati-
fundia which ‘ruined Italy’ was the devastated area in the South
which became public property as a result of the Hannibalic
War, partly in punishment for the defection of the original
owners to the invader’s camp, and partly because the original
owners had simply disappeared. Thereafter the new class of
post-war ‘planters’ and ‘ranchers’ was able to add field to field
by buying up the freeholds which were thrown upon the mar¬
ket when their owners were mobilized and kept under arms for
years on end in some distant theatre of chronic frontier-war¬
fare—on the western borders of the two provinces in Spain, or
on the northern borders of the province of Macedonia.
In this age the subjects and the citizens of the Roman Re¬
public were fellow victims of a ci-devant Roman governing
class which had been transmuted by the intoxication of victory
into a band of robbers. In 104 b.c., when the whole Hellenic
World was overshadowed by the common menace of a bar¬
barian avalanche from Northern Europe, the King of Bithynia,
which was officially a friendly state under Rome’s protectorate,
could reply with biting irony, when the highest representative
of the Roman Government served him with a requisition for a
contingent of troops, ‘that most of his subjects had been kid¬
napped by the [Roman] tax-farmers and were now living in
io8
slavery in territories under Roman administration.’ And in 13 3

b.c. a high-minded young Roman aristocrat who attempted to
carry out a social reform, and thereby precipitated a revolu¬
tion, could declare without contradiction:
The wild animals that range over Italy have a hole, and each of
them has its lair and nest, but the men who fight and die for Italy
have no part or lot in anything but the air and the sunlight . . .
It is for the sake of other men’s wealth and luxury that these go
to the wars and give their lives. They are called the lords of the
World, and they have not a single clod of earth to call their own.
The militant refusal of Tiberius Gracchus’ peers to support

him in seeking a remedy for the Roman peasantry’s wrongs
evoked a revolution which festered into a civil war; and the
self-destructive violence which was let loose within the bosom
of the Roman Commonwealth by the murder of the would-be
reformer in 13 3 b.c. was brought under control again only by
the establishment of the Pax Augusta in 31 b.c. after the Battle
of Actium.
The Pax Augusta inaugurated no ‘Golden Age,’ but only an
‘Indian Summer.’ The injury which Roman outrages had al¬
ready inflicted upon Rome herself, and upon the whole of the
Hellenic Society, was quite past repair. The most that the gods
of the dominant minority were able to grant to the last of their
favourites was a respite which was not a reprieve; and even this
respite was to redound to the benefit, not of the bankrupt gods’
own people, but of a nova progenies: a ‘coming race’ whose eyes
were set upon a distant horizon and whose faith was founded
on the power of a different saviour. The irreparable event
which had occurred in the Hellenic World between the gener¬
ation of Polybius and the generation of Virgil was the Seces¬
sion of the Proletariat; and the inexorable event which was to
follow between the generation of Virgil and that of Marcus

Aurelius was the budding, within the bosom of this Proletariat,
of the germ of a new social order.
The material grievance which Gracchus had sought to rem¬
edy by political action was eventually redressed in a perversely
anti-social way when the descendants of such Italian peas¬
ants as had succeeded in still clinging to the land were ruth¬
lessly evicted by a succession of revolutionary war-lords, from
Sulla to Augustus himself, in order to provide allotments for
the descendants of their uprooted brothers who had long since
become incapable of effectively ‘going back to the land’ after
having been forced for years on end to make the camp their
home and the sword their means of livelihood. This travesty of
the Gracchan remedy was even worse than the disease of an
uprooted and militarized citizen-proletariat. It dealt the final
blow to Italian agriculture. But, at a moment when the social
problems of Italy were utterly defeating all the manoeuvres of
Roman statesmanship, the parable of the wild things’ ‘holes’
and ‘nests,’ which Tiberius Gracchus had once employed in a
political speech as a figurative search-light to show up a social
wrong, was being applied to illustrate a different and a deeper
truth by a prophet in Syria who made no impression on the
minds of the Roman authorities of the day (not even when, in
the course of their administrative routine, they had occasion to
put him to death). When Jesus took upon himself the suffer¬
ings of a Galilaean peasantry who had been despoiled by the
same predatory hand as the peasants of the Ager Mantuanus,
and when he said to the scribe ‘the foxes have holes and the
birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man hath not where
to lay his head,’ he was using the Gracchan image in order to
make the Proletariat understand that the wrongful and violent
spoliation of their material goods was not a ground for revolu-
I IO WAR AND CIVILIZATION
tionary reprisals, or even perhaps for political reforms, but was

actually a blessing in disguise because it was an unsuspected
source of spiritual wealth.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth . . .
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
In a lesser degree this intoxication of victory, which carried

the Roman governing class to perdition after their conquest of
the Hellenic World in the half-century ending in the Battle of
Pydna, was likewise the ruin of the Spaniards and the Portu¬
guese after their conquest of the New World at the beginning
of the Modern Age of our Western history, and again the ruin
of the British after their conquest of Bengal and Canada in the
Seven Years’ War.
The Spaniards and Portuguese, who in a.d. 1493 had ob¬
tained from the Pope an arbitral award, partitioning between
them the whole of the Overseas World as though no other
claimants were in the field, saw their monopoly broken within
less than a century when the Dutch and the English and the
French made free with the Spanish preserves in America and
the Portuguese preserves in Africa and India, and both the
Iberian Powers’ preserves in the Far East, after the defeat of
the Spanish Armada. And the intoxication of the Iberian pio¬
neers with their original achievement—their overweening pride
in the knowledge that
We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea—
was the gaping joint in their armour through which their lynx-
eyed and nimble-handed European competitors directed their
disabling thrusts at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
THE INTOXICATION OF VICTORY HI
As for the English, they were temporarily shaken out of the

moderation which they have studiously practised both before
and since by the extraordinary lavishness of Fortune when she
showered Canada upon them with one hand and Bengal, simul¬
taneously, with the other. In 1763 it seemed ‘the manifest des¬
tiny of the British Empire to swallow up the whole of North
America as well as the whole of India. Yet twenty years later
Great Britain had lost the better half of one of the two sub¬
continents and was in imminent danger of losing the whole of
the other. It is true that the verdict of History has now ac¬
quitted British statesmanship of exclusive responsibility for the
break-up of the First British Empire. American historians have
latterly done much to show that in the fratricidal war of 1775-83
the war-guilt was divided; and the name of Warren Hastings
no longer sounds so sinister as it was made to sound a century
and a half ago. Nevertheless the fact remains that the Thirteen
Colonies would never have been lost to the British Crown if
from 1763 to 1775 it had shown towards them the same tact
and consideration as it has repeatedly shown towards Canada
from 1774 onwards. Nor would Bengal have been retained—
nor, a fortiori, enlarged into an empire embracing all India—if
the predatory practices of the Company’s servants in the East,
from Clive and Warren Hastings downwards, during the
twenty-six years following the intoxicating victory of Plassey
had not been discouraged by the abortive India Bill of 1783 and
the effective India Bill of 1784 and the long-drawn-out state
trial of 1786-95. However sincerely Clive may have ‘marvelled
at’ his ‘own moderation,’ his economy of virtue would assur¬
edly soon have cost his countrymen the loss of an Oriental
dominion which his excess of unscrupulousness had suddenly
won for them, if they had not exerted themselves to improve
upon Clive’s moral standards under the sobering influence of
their American disaster.
CHAPTER VII
Goliath and David
In our human military history the analogue of the biological

competition between the tiny soft-furred Mammal and the mas¬
sive armoured Reptile is the saga of the duel between David
and Goliath; and, if we take this legendary Syriac combat as
our starting point, we shall find the same drama acted and re¬
performed in a continuous series of matches between new¬
fangled and old-fashioned military techniques.
Before the fatal day on which he challenges the armies of
Israel, Goliath has won such triumphant victories with his
spear whose staff is like a weaver’s beam and whose head
weighs six hundred shekels of iron, and has found himself so
completely proof against hostile weapons in his panoply of
casque and corselet and target and greaves, that he can no
longer conceive of any alternative armament; and he believes
that in this armament he is invincible. He therefore challenges
the enemy of the day to choose a champion to meet him in
single combat, on the assumption that, if any champion is
forthcoming, he will likewise be a spearman armed cap-a-pie,
and in the assurance that any Israelite who has the hardihood
to fight the Philistine champion with his own weapons will be
an easy prey for him. So hard set is Goliath’s mind in these two
ideas that, when he sees David running forward to meet him
with no armour on his body and nothing in his hand that
GOLIATH AND DAVID
”3
catches the eye except a staff, Goliath takes umbrage, instead
of taking alarm, at his adversary’s apparent unpreparedness,
and exclaims: ‘Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves? ’
Goliath does not suspect that this youth’s impertinence is not a
piece of boyish folly but is, on the contrary, a carefully con¬
sidered manoeuvre (David having actually realized, quite as
clearly as Goliath himself, that in Goliath’s own accoutrements
he cannot hope to be Goliath’s match, and having therefore re¬
jected, after trying on, the panoply which Saul has pressed
upon him); nor does Goliath notice the sling in the hand which
does not hold the staff, nor wonder what mischief may be hid¬
den in the shepherd’s bag. And so this luckless Philistine Tri-
ceratops stalks forward pompously to offer his unvisored fore¬
head as a target for the sling-stone which is to slay him at one
shot before ever his contemptible adversary comes within
range of his hitherto lethal spear.
Goliath of Gath was not the first hoplite in the history of
Life on Earth to court and incur this disconcerting doom; for
armour far more ponderous than his had been worn by rep¬
tilian and mammalian cataphracts before ever Goliath’s first
human ancestor had made his appearance on the terrestrial
scene.
One seductive and ultimately always fatal path [of Evolution]

has been the development of protective armour. An organism can
protect itself by concealment, by swiftness in flight, by effective
counter-attack, by uniting for attack and defence with other in¬
dividuals of its species and also by encasing itself within bony
plates and spines. The last course was adopted by the ganoid fishes
of the Devonian with their shining armour. Some of the great
lizards of the later Mesozoic were elaborately encased. Some Ter¬
tiary mammals, especially in South America, were immense and
bizarre creatures; and one wonders how long a period of evolu¬
tionary history was needed for them thus to arm themselves. Al¬
ways the experiment of armour failed. Creatures adopting it
H4
tended to become unwieldy. They had to move relatively slowly.

Hence they were forced to live mainly on vegetable food; and
thus in general they were at a disadvantage as compared with foes
living on more rapidly ‘profitable’ animal food. The repeated
failure of protective armour shows that, even at a somewhat low
evolutionary level, mind triumphed over mere matter. It is this
sort of triumph which has been supremely exemplified in Man.
It is ideally exemplified in the saga of David and Goliath.

Yet, while this classic tale sums up for all time a philosophic
truth that is also illustrated by the slowly unfolding history of
human competition in armaments, it is at the same time a matter
of historical fact that the individual hoplite champion of the
post-Minoan interregnum—a Goliath of Gath or a Hector of
Troy—did not succumb to David’s sling or Philoctetes’ bow
but to the Myrmidons’ phalanx: a veritable Leviathan in which
a multitude of hoplites set shoulder to shoulder and helmet to
helmet and shield to shield. While each single phalangite in the
rank-and-file was a replica of Hector or Goliath in his ac¬
coutrements, he was the antithesis of the Homeric hoplite in
his spirit; for the essence of the phalanx did not consist in the
equipment of its component men-at-arms, but in the discipline
which had transformed a barbaric rabble of individual warriors
into a military formation whose orderly evolutions could ac¬
complish ten times as much as the unco-ordinated efforts of an
equal number of equally well-armed individual champions.
This new military technique, of which we already catch
some anticipatory glimpses in the Iliad, made its indubitable
entry upon the stage of history in the shape of a Spartan pha¬
lanx which marched through the rhythm of Tyrtaeus’ verses
to its socially disastrous military victory in the Second Messeno-
Spartan War; but the triumph of the Spartan phalanx was not
definitive. After driving all its ‘opposite numbers’ off the field,,
1 Barnes, E. W.: Scientific Theory and Religion, pp. 474-75.
GOLIATH AND DAVID 115
it succumbed, in its turn, to new techniques; and it is signifi¬
cant that this discomfiture of the Spartan phalanx came to pass
as soon as the Spartans were tempted to ‘rest on their oars’ on
the strength of their victory in the Atheno-Peloponnesian War
of 431-404 b.c.—a victory which seemed to complete the mili¬
tary supremacy of Sparta in Hellas and so to crown the victory
which the same Spartan tactics had gained over the Messenians
more than two hundred years before. Within thirty-three years
of the Athenian debacle of 404 b.c. the triumphant Spartan
phalanx had been ignominiously put out of court: first by an
Athenian swarm of peltasts—a host of Davids with which the
phalanx of Goliaths found itself quite unable to cope—and then
by a Theban column, a tactical innovation which improved the
phalanx, with decisive effect, by introducing an uneven distri¬
bution of its depth and weight and ‘drive,’ and thereby capping
the old asset of discipline with the new element of surprise.
The Athenian and Theban techniques, however, were as swiftly
and surely undone by their successive triumphs as the Spartan
technique itself; for their respective victories over the Spartan
phalanx in 390 and 371 were both cancelled at one stroke in
338 b.c. by a Macedonian formation in which a highly differen¬
tiated skirmisher and phalangite had been skilfully integrated
with a heavy cavalry into a single fighting force.
If the Macedonian phalanx, with its light-armed fringe and
its cavalry arm, surpassed the Spartan phalanx as an instrument
of war in the measure of the difference in range between the
Macedonian and the Spartan conquests, then the gulf between
the two techniques was great indeed, since the Spartan phalanx
merely conquered Hellas, while the Macedonian army con¬
quered both Hellas and the Achaemenian Empire. Fiom the
banks of the Cephisus and the Eurotas to the banks of the
Jaxartes and the Beas, the Macedonians marched at will with¬
out meeting any opponent who was able to stand up to them.
But the most impressive testimony to the prowess of the Mace¬

donian military machine is not the long list of the military
Powers that were successively defeated by Philip II and Alex¬
ander the Great; it is the avowal which was made, after the
event, by the victorious enemy commander of the opposing
army in a decisive battle which was fought 170 years after
Philip’s crushing victory at Chaeronea.
The consul Lucius [Aemilius Paullus] had never seen a phalanx

in his life until he encountered one—for the first time—in the
Roman war with Perseus; and, when it was all over, he used
freely to confess to his friends at home that the Macedonian
phalanx was the most formidable and terrifying sight that had ever
met his eyes—and this from a soldier who had not merely wit¬
nessed, but had actually participated in, a greater number of ac¬
tions than any other captain of the day.2
At Pydna, however, in 168 b.c. it was not Perseus’ phalanx but

Paullus’ legions that emerged victorious; and the eulogy of the
Macedonian formation which has just been quoted is at the
same time a funeral oration pronounced over its dead body by
the master of the Roman formation which dealt the phalanx its
death-blow. The Macedonian army of the second century b.c.
was as little able to cope with the Romans as the Athenian or
Theban or Achaemenian fighting forces of the fourth century
b.c. had been able to cope with the Macedonian army of Philip
II and Alexander the Great; and the cause of this sensational
‘reversal of roles’ in Macedonian military fortunes was the senile
adulation of a technique which had carried all before it through
five successive generations. A hard-won Macedonian victory
over a diminutive Athens and Thebes had been followed by an
easy Macedonian conquest of the vast Achaemenian Empire;
and thereafter the Macedonian soldiers ‘rested on their oars’ as
the unchallenged masters of all but the outskirts of the Habita-
2 Polybius, Book XXIX, ch. 17.
GOLIATH AND DAVID I 17
ble World, while, beyond their western horizon, the Romans

were revolutionizing the art of war through an experience
gained from their sufferings in their tremendous struggle with
Hannibal. The immense superiority of the post-Hannibalic
Roman over the post-Alexandrine Macedonian fighting-machine
was conclusively demonstrated at their first encounter; and the
omen given by the cavalry skirmish in Illyria in 200 b.c. was
fulfilled in 197 b.c. at Cynoscephalae and was confirmed in 168
b.c. at Pydna.
The Roman legion triumphed over the Macedonian phalanx
because it carried the integration of the light infantryman with
the phalangite, which the Macedonians had begun, a long step
farther. In the Macedonian technique this integration depended
on a meticulously exact co-ordination of two arms which were
at the farthest possible extreme from one another in their equip¬
ment and their training, and which were actually still segre¬
gated from one another in separate units. If this vital co-ordina¬
tion between the Macedonian phalanx and the Macedonian
light infantry happened to break down on the battle-field, then
either arm, just because of its extreme specialization, was in
danger of finding itself at the mercy of a more versatile adver¬
sary. Accordingly everything depended on the precision of
military evolutions in the field; and the necessary precision was
obviously impossible to guarantee. Such natural contretemps as
the fog at Cynoscephalae and the broken ground at Pydna
were enough to dislocate a Macedonian army’s formation with
results that were disastrous when the enemy was a fighting-
force with the efficiency of the post-Hannibalic Roman army.
This Roman efficiency was a thing of yesterday; for in the
Central Italian penumbra of the Hellenic World an old-fash¬
ioned phalanx of the pre-Macedonian, and indeed pre-Theban,
type had been seen in the field at as recent a date as the day of
Cannae, when the heavy Roman infantry, embattled in an an-
tique Spartan phalanx-formation, had been rounded up from

the rear by Hannibal’s Spanish and Gallic heavy cavalry, and
had then been slaughtered like cattle by his African heavy in¬
fantry on either flank. But in the hard school of their repeated
defeats in the Hannibalic War the Romans had taught them¬
selves an improvement in infantry technique which transformed
the Roman army, at a stroke, from the least to the most effi¬
cient fighting-force in the Hellenic World of the day by
eliminating the crucial weakness of the prevailing Macedonian
system. In those creative years the Romans had invented a new
type of armament and a new type of formation which made
it possible for any given soldier, and any given unit, to play
either the light infantryman’s or the hoplite’s part, and to
change over from the one kind of tactics to the other at a mo¬
ment’s notice in the face of the enemy.
The superiority of this post-Hannibalic Roman infantry
technique over a Macedonian technique that had been static for
more than a century before the outbreak of the Second Romano-
Macedonian War in 200 b.c. is lucidly explained by the con¬
temporary Arcadian observer Polybius:
The phalanx, with its unique and potent technique, can count,
as is easily demonstrable, upon sweeping away any enemy forma¬
tion that ventures to face it front to front. Its charge is irresistible
. . . What, then, is the explanation of the triumph of the Romans?
And what is the catch that makes the employment of the phalanx
spell defeat?
The catch lies in the discrepancy between that element of in-
determinability—both of situations and of terrain—which is in¬
herent in War as a practical art, and the inelasticity of the phalanx,
which in practice can only do itself justice in one particular situa¬
tion and on one particular kind of terrain. Of course, if, when¬
ever it was a question of a decisive engagement, the enemy were
under compulsion to accept the situation and the terrain that hap¬
pen to suit the phalanx, then presumably the employment of the
phalanx would be an infallible talisman of victory. But if it is in

fact always possible—and easily possible—for the enemy to decline
battle on these terms, then the phalanx-formation ceases to be for¬
midable.
Moreover it is admitted that the phalanx requires a tei rain
which is level and clear and innocent of any such obstacles as
ditches, outcrops, ravines, crags and water-courses—any of which are
quite enough to throw it out of step and to dislocate its formation.
It will also be admitted on all hands that the kind of terrain which
the phalanx requires—a terrain innocent of obstacles over a stretch
of two thousand yards and upwards—is almost impossible to find,
or is at any rate exceedingly rare; and, even supposing that it has
been found, it is always possible, as we have pointed out, for the
enemy to decline battle . . . [or, if he does accept battle with
the phalanx on level ground, the enemy can still always secure the
victory by keeping part of his own force in reserve, engaging the
phalanx with the rest of his force just so far as to loosen the pha¬
lanx’s formation and cause it to expose its flanks, and then throw¬
ing his reserves against the flanks or rear of the phalanx when
these are no longer covered by light infantry and cavalry].3 In
short, the situations that are in favour of the phalanx can be easily
evaded by the enemy, whereas the phalanx cannot evade the sit¬
uations that tell against it; and, if the facts as I have stated them
are true, this is manifestly an enormous handicap.
Moreover a phalanx, like any other force, has to march throug
all kinds of country, to encamp, to forestall the enemy in occupy¬
ing key-positions, to conduct and undergo sieges, and to encounter
unforeseen emergencies. All these operations-which are part and
parcel of War-are apt to be influential, and are sometimes de¬
cisive in determining the issue. And for all such operations the
Macedonian military technique is clumsy, and sometimes entire y
ineffective, because it does not permit the phalangite to do him¬
self justice either in the ranks or as an individual. On the other
hand the Roman military technique is effective for all these op¬
erations alike, because every Roman soldier, once under arms an
on duty, is equally well adapted for dealing with every kind of
terrain and situation and emergency; and not only so, but he
s The passage between brackets is a precis of the corresponding passage

in the original.—A.J.T.
also equally in his element, and equally master of the situation,

whether he is called upon to take part in a general or in a partial
engagement, or to go into action by companies, or to carry on
individually. It will be seen that the Roman fighting-machine is
enormously superior to its rivals in its efficiency in detail, and it
is therefore only natural that the Romans should be enormously
more successful than their adversaries in attaining their military
objectives.
This versatility, which was the characteristic feature of the

full-fledged Roman military genius, made the integration of the
skirmisher with the hoplite complete; for the mobility of the
one and the irresistibility of the other were now combined in
the person of every legionary; and when the legion, after hav¬
ing been evoked by Hannibal and employed, with destructive
effect, against the antiquated Macedonian array, had been per¬
fected in the Roman anti-barbarian and civil wars by a series
of great captains beginning with Marius and ending with
Caesar, it had attained the greatest efficiency which was possi¬
ble for infantry before the invention of firearms. At the very
moment, however, when the legionary was becoming perfect
after his own kind, he received the first of a long series of de¬
feats from a pair of mounted men-at-arms with utterly differ¬
ent techniques—the light horse-archer and the mail-clad lancer
or cataphract—who between them were eventually to drive the
legionary off the field a la debcmdade. The victory of the horse-
archer over the legionary at Carrhae in 53 b.c. forestalled, by
five years, the classic combat of legionary against legionary in
48 b.c. at Pharsalus, a battle in which the Roman infantry tech¬
nique was probably at its zenith. The omen of Carrhae was
confirmed, more than four centuries later, at Adrianople, where
the cataphract gave the legionary his coup de grace in a.d. 378.
The disaster at Adrianople, which was the tragic end of an
ascendancy that the legionary had retained—albeit with increas-
GOLIATH AND DAVID I2 I
ing difficulty—for nearly six hundred years, has been vividly

described by a contemporary Roman officer who was also a
Latin historian.4
On the eve of this catastrophe the confidence of the Roman
high command in the traditional Roman military technique was
still so overweening that the Emperor Valens, who had just
succeeded in making contact with the Gothic host that was
then ravaging the Roman territory of Thrace, insisted on ad¬
ministering immediate punishment to the refractory barbarians.
He would not wait for the reinforcements which his nephew
and colleague Gratian was bringing by forced marches from
the west, though he had received dispatches announcing that
Gratian’s army was now on the point of joining hands with his;
and he would not entertain the overtures which the Goths—
disconcerted at having evoked so strong a Roman military reac¬
tion—were belatedly attempting to make to their indignant Im¬
perial adversary. Valens gave the order for his legions to march
at once upon the Gothic lager; and at first sight it seemed as
though his intransigent policy were justified by its effect.
The terrifying din of [the legionaries’] clashing arms, and their

aggressive drumming on their shields, so intimidated the bar¬
barians—who were also weakened by the absence of a part of their
host which was operating at a distance under the command of
Alatheus and Saphrax, and had not yet had time to return, though
the order was on its way to them-that they sent parlementaires to
ask for peace.
It looked as though the legions had won their victory without

having had to strike a blow; but in reality Valens’ intransigence
had not broken the Goths’ spirit but had inspired them with
the courage of despair; and the parley was a feint.
The purpose of the Gothic commander Fritigern was simply
4Ammianus Marcellinus: Res Gestae, Book XXXI, ch. 11-13.

122
to gain time until he could take up the Roman challenge with

his whole force—including the absent corps, which consisted
of the heavy cavalry—and his ruse was successful; for he man¬
aged to draw the parley out—while the Romans stood to arms,
without food or water, through the heat of the day—until ‘the
Gothic cavalry, reappearing on the scene with Alatheus and
Saphrax at its head, and stiffened by a contingent of Alani,
burst upon the Roman army as a thunderbolt bursts against a
mountain-range, charged at lightning speed, and swept away,
in a whirlwind of slaughter, as many of the Roman troops as it
managed to engage at close quarters.’ The legionaries were
thrown out of their formation and were herded together into
so dense a mass that they had no longer any room to wield, or
even draw, their swords; and in this helpless plight they suf¬
fered the fate which their own predecessors had once inflicted
on the Macedonian phalangites. Having caught the legionaries
at this irretrievable disadvantage, the cataphracts pressed home
their attack without giving their discomfited opponents a
chance to rally, until ‘at length, under the weight and “drive”
of the barbarian offensive, the Roman line gave way, and the
legionaries—driven to the last resort in a desperate situation—
took to their heels in a chaotic sauve qui peut’ The historian
vouches for the fact that ‘the Roman casualties amounted to
about two-thirds of the effectives engaged’ (the Emperor
Valens himself was among the missing); and he expresses the
opinion that, ‘apart from the Battle of Cannae, there’ was ‘no
record, in all the annals of Roman military history, of any
other action in which the carnage was so great as this.’
In measuring Adrianople by Cannae, Ammianus gives proof
of his historical insight, for it was the slaughter at Cannae,
where the Roman infantry had been at the mercy of Hannibal’s
heavy cavalry, that had stimulated the Roman military genius
into transforming a clumsy phalanx on the old-fashioned Spar-
GOLIATH AND DAVID I23
tan model into the mobile legion which had been victorious
first at Zama and then at Cynoscephalae and Pydna. In the year
of Adrianople, however, the lesson of Cannae was nearly six
hundred years old; and during those six centuries the Roman
legionaries had ‘rested on their oars,’ like the Macedonian pha¬
langites before them, until they allowed themselves to be over¬
taken and ridden down by an Oriental heavy cavalry which
was a more formidable engine of war than Hannibal’s European
squadrons, and which could not be coped with effectively with¬
out some fresh innovation in infantry technique. The effective
innovation was discovered in the end, but not for a thousand
years, and then not by Roman wits. Though the Romans had
received repeated warnings of the legionary’s inferiority to
Oriental cavalry—in Crassus’ disaster of 5 5 b.c. and Valerian s
of a.d. 260 and Julian’s of a.d. 363—they had not been stimu¬
lated to make any fresh creative advance in infantry technique.
They had left the legion, unreformed, to its fate; and, when
‘the knock-out blow’ was duly delivered in the fulness of time
in a.d. 378 at Adrianople, they could think of no more original
remedy than to discard the defeated legionary outright and to
take over the victorious cataphract at second-hand. Gratian s
colleague and successor, Theodosius, rewarded the barbarian
horsemen for having annihilated the Roman infantry by hiring
them to fill the vacant place; and, even when the Imperial Gov¬
ernment had paid the inevitable price for the brief respite that
was purchased by this short-sighted policy, and had seen the
mercenary barbarian troopers partition all its western prov¬
inces into barbarian ‘successor-states,’ the new native army,
which saved the Greek and Oriental provinces, at the eleventh
hour, from going the same way, was armed and mounted on
the barbarian pattern.
The ignominy of the legionary’s end is accentuated by the
strange fact that the cataphract who rode him down on the
plains of Thrace in a.d. 378 was himself a degenerate. The Par¬

thian cavalryman who had forced Crassus’ legions to capitulate
at Carrhae in 53 b.c. had been a horse-archer, like his native
Nomad prototype; the Sarmatian and Gothic cataphracts who
annihilated Valens’ legions at Adrianople were mere lancers
who won their victory by the crude and clumsy method of
charging home, in substitution for the refined technique of
overwhelming their enemy—in the manner of the Suren’s horse-
archers at Carrhae in 53 b.c.—with a ceaseless discharge of ar¬
rows supplied by a never-failing camel commissariat. Carrhae
‘ought to have revolutionized the World’s warfare; but in fact
it produced little effect, for Surenas was put to death next year
and his organization broken up.’ The future lay not with the
light horse-archer but with the cataphract, who had been rep¬
resented at Carrhae in the Parthian ranks without making any
notable contribution to the brilliant victory of his unarmoured
comrade. And the cataphract had no sooner put on the As¬
syrian infantryman’s armour than he had begun to discard the
Nomad s bow for the hoplite’s lance. The rudimentary As¬
syrian cataphract still remained a horse-archer; and a force of
a thousand Sakas who fought for the last of the Achaemenidae
at Gaugamela in 331 b.c. are described as still being equipped
with bows though the horses as well as the men were armoured.
When they went into action, however, these Saka demi-cata-
phracts did not shoot; they charged. And the Parthian full¬
blown cataphract who is portrayed in the graffito at Dura does
not even carry a bow in addition to his lance. Notwithstanding
the success of the light horse-archer against Crassus at Carrhae,
the failure of the charging cataphract against Ventidius in the
next round of this Romano-Parthian trial of strength, and the
renewed success of the light horse-archer against Mark An¬
tony, the Parthians opted for the cataphract; and the Arsacids’
example was followed by their successors the Sasanidae. It is
GOLIATH AND DAVID I25
true that Belisarius’ sixth-century Roman cataphracts, as Pro¬
copius describes them, were horse-archers of the Assyrian kind;
but in general it was the armoured lancer, and not the armoured
horse-archer, who kept the saddle for the next twelve hundred
years after the light horse-archer’s victory at Carrhae; and
there is an extraordinary uniformity in this lancer’s accoutre¬
ments over a Time-span of more than a millennium and across
the length and breadth of Europe and Asia. His identity is un¬
mistakable, whether the portrait in which he presents himself
to us happens to be in some fresco, dating from the first cen¬
tury of the Christian Era, in a Crimean tomb; or on the third-
and fourth- and fifth- and sixth-century bas-reliefs of Sasanian
kings in Fars; or in the clay figurines of those Far Eastern men-
at-arms who were the fighting-force of the T’ang Dynasty
(imperabcmt a.d. 618-907); or in the eleventh-century tapestry
at Bayeux which depicts the defeat of the antiquated English
foot-soldiers of the day by King William the Conqueror’s Nor¬
man knights.
If this longevity and ubiquity of the cataphract are astonish¬
ing, it is also noteworthy that he only becomes ubiquitous in
a degenerate form; and, since sheer material range and scale are
apt to be symptoms of decay, we shall not be surprised when
we read the next chapter in the cataphract’s history. The story
may be told, again, in the words of a contemporary who in this
case was also an eye-witness.
I was in the army of the Under-Secretary when he went forth

to meet the Tatars on the western side of the City of Peace
[Baghdad], on the occasion of its supreme disaster in the year
a.h. 656 [which began on the 8th January, a.d. 1258]. We met
at Nahr Bashir, one of the dependencies of Dujayl; and there
would ride forth from amongst us to offer single combat a knight
fully accoutred and mounted on an Arab horse, so that it was as
though he and his steed together were [solid as] some great
mountain. Then there would come forth to meet him from the
Mongols a horseman mounted on a horse like a donkey, and hav¬
ing in his hand a spear like a spindle, wearing neither robe nor
armour, so that all who saw him were moved to laughter. Yet ere
the day was done the victory was theirs, and they inflicted on us a
great defeat, which was the Key of Evil, and thereafter there be¬
fell us what befell us.5
Thus the legendary encounter between Goliath and David

at the dawn of Syriac history repeats itself at night-fall, per¬
haps twenty-three centuries later, as an attested historical fact;
and, though on this occasion the giant and the pygmy played
their parts on horseback instead of on foot, the outcome was
the same.
The invincible Tatar qazaq who overcame the ’Iraqi cata-
phract and sacked Baghdad and starved the ’Abbasid Caliph to
death in his treasury and gave the coup de grace to a Caliphate
which had been a resumption of the Achaemenian Empire and
a reintegration of the Syriac universal state, was a light horse-
archer of the genuine and persistent Nomadic type which had
made itself known, and dreaded, in South-Western Asia for
the first time through the Cimmerian and Scyth eruption at the
turn of the eighth and seventh centuries b.c. In the heart of the
Steppe, from which the Tatars were erupting in their turn in
the thirteenth century of the Christian Era, the ancient Nomad
military technique had lived on to assert its superiority now, at
the end of the chapter, over the armour-plated travesty of itself
which was what the imitative sedentary societies had made of
it in the course of some two thousand years of brief inventive¬
ness and long stagnation. But if David-on-horseback duly dis¬
comfited Goliath-on-horseback at this historic moment, the
5 Falak-ad-DIn Muhammad b. Aydlmir, quoted at first hand by Ibn-at-
Tiqtaqa in Kitab-al-F akhri. This translation is taken from Browne, E. G.:
A Literary History of Persia, vol. ii, p. 462.
GOLIATH AND DAVID 12J
sequel to their encounter in this repetition of the story was also

faithful to the original. We have seen that the mailed champion
on foot who was laid low by David’s sling-stone was super¬
seded thereafter not by David himself but by a phalanx of
Goliaths in which each phalangite was equipped with Goliath’s
accoutrements but was taught to use them to better effect by
fighting in a disciplined formation instead of indulging in the
primitive sport of single combat. And now, in the Cavalry Age,
discipline won its victory over individualism once more. For
Hulagu Khan’s Mongol light horse who had overcome the
’Abbasid Caliph’s knights under the walls of Baghdad in a.d.
1258 were subsequently defeated again and again—in a.d. 1260

and 1281 and 1299—1300 and 1303—whenever they swam the
Euphrates and tried conclusions with the Mamluk masters of
Syria and Egypt under whose aegis a new series of ’Abbasid
Caliphs had found asylum. In their accoutrements the Mamluks
were neither better nor worse equipped than their fellow Mus¬
lim knights who had been overthrown so ignominiously, a few
years before, at Nahr Bashir; but in their tactics the Mamluks
were true to their name and status in obeying discipline; and
this discipline gave them the mastery over Mongol sharp-shooter
and Frankish knight-errant.
Having now watched Goliath and David fight first on foot
and then on horseback,6 we cannot leave the amphitheatre with-
6 As a curiosity of history, the following passage, written in 1938, which

appears in the text of the original work may be reproduced here in a
footnote: [A Study of History, vol. iv, p. 463]
In the year 1938 it was again already certain that the technique which
had won the war of 1914-18 would not be the last link in the chain-if
Mankind were so perverse as to go on cultivating the Art of War after
it had attained a degree of deadliness at which any further indulgence in
belligerency seemed likely to bring with it the total destruction of So¬
ciety. In another war in the West the ‘post-war’ British Navy and the
‘post-war’ French system of semi-subterranean frontier fortifications
might well prove to be nothing but mill-stones round the necks of the
out waiting to see the arena transformed into a mtumachia, for

our pair of gladiators to repeat their duel afloat. We may aptly
conclude our survey of the destruction which is invited by any
idolization of an ephemeral technique with an illustration that
is offered by one of the curiosities of naval history. When the
Romans took to the sea in the course of the First Romano-
Punic War (gerebatur 264-241 b.c.), they had to face a Cartha¬
ginian navy which was heir to all the refinements that had been
introduced successively into the art of naval warfare in the
Mediterranean during the two centuries that had elapsed since
the generation of Themistocles. According to the story—
whether this be authentic fact or the ‘philosophic truth’ of
legend—the Roman landlubbers nonplussed the Carthaginian
masters of the naval art by cancelling two centuries of naval
progress at a stroke and reducing naval warfare once again to
that primitive kind of land-warfare-on-shipboard which it had
been at the beginning of all things. Incapable of meeting the
Carthaginians on equal terms, and ruminating regretfully upon
their own conspicuous ascendancy on shore, the Romans are
said to have invented a gangway, slung from a mast and fitted
winners of what would then be remembered by Posterity, not as ‘the war

to end War,’ but merely as the event of 1914-18 in a military competition
which the lacerated competitors had failed to bring to a timely end. In
another war the French fortifications might be overleapt, and the British
Grand Fleet sunk in harbour, by enemy aircraft laden with all the de¬
structive contrivances of the twentieth-century Western chemists. ‘The
next war,’ if it ever came to wipe ‘the Great Society’ out of existence,
might well be won—if the notion of ‘victory’ then still retained any
meaning—by a ‘post-war’ professional force whose strength would lie,
not in numbers, but in a discipline and training which would enable these
twentieth-century Janissaries to profit to the full from an unrivalled
command over an armoury of new-fangled weapons. A gang of such
militarized mechanics might conquer by the same arts and virtues as the
grenadiers of Frederick the Great and the musketeers of Selim I; and if
the victorious war-band of Strakers-at-arms were the German Reichs-
ivehr, then the wheel of European military history would have come
round full circle.
with a grappling-iron, by means of which they literally came to

grips with the Carthaginian warships. By this shockingly un¬
professional innovation in technique they seized the tactical
initiative, inhibited their astonished and indignant opponents
from employing their traditional tactics of manoeuvring and
ramming, and forcibly substituted the tactics of grappling and
boarding, with decisive effects upon the fortunes of the war.
If there is any truth in this story, it brings out the connection
between breakdown and idolatry very clearly; for in this in¬
stance we see an intrinsically superior technique which has
been idolized by its adepts being defeated by an intrinsically
inferior technique which has no point in its favour except that
it has not yet had time to be idolized, because it is an innova¬
tion; and this strange spectacle suggests very forcibly that it
is the act of idolization that does the mischief, and not any in¬
trinsic quality in the object.
CHAPTER VIII
The Price of Progress in Military Technique
Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the break¬

downs of civilizations during the four or five millennia which
have witnessed the score or so of breakdowns that are on rec¬
ord up to the present date. Militarism breaks a civilization
down by causing the local states into which the society is ar¬
ticulated to collide with one another in destructive internecine
conflicts. In this suicidal process, the entire social fabric be¬
comes fuel to feed the devouring flame in the brazen bosom of
Molech. The single art of war makes progress at the expense
of all the arts of peace; and, before this deadly ritual has com¬
pleted the destruction of its votaries, they may have become
so expert in the use of their implements of slaughter that, if
they happen for a moment to pause in their orgy of mutual
destruction and to turn their weapons for a season against the
breasts of strangers, they are apt to carry all before them.
A case in point is the latter-day expansion of Hellenism to
India and to Britain between the fourth century b.c. and the
first century of the Christian Era; for the roads which this ex¬
pansion followed had been opened by Macedonian and by Ro¬
man arms, and those arms had been wrought up to an irresist¬
ible efficiency in the long-drawn-out internecine warfare be¬
tween the Great Powers of the Hellenic World in which
Athens failed to establish her hegemony and Rome succeeded
PRICE OF PROGRESS IN MILITARY TECHNIQUE 131
in delivering ‘the knock-out blow.’ Thus, in Hellenic history,

Militarism was at least partly responsible for the latter-day ex¬
pansion of the Hellenic World as well as for the disintegration
of the Hellenic Society with which this expansion was contem¬
poraneous.
An example of technique improving while a civilization de¬
clines is afforded by the contrast between the Upper Palaeo¬
lithic Age in Europe and the Lower Neolithic, which is its
immediate successor in the technological series. The Upper
Palaeolithic Society remained content with implements of rough
workmanship, but it developed a fine aesthetic sense, and it did
not neglect to discover certain simple means of giving its sense
a pictorial expression. The deft and vivid charcoal sketches of
animals, which survive on the walls of Palaeolithic Man s cave-
dwellings, where they have been discovered by our modern
archaeologists, excite our astonishment and admiration. The
Lower Neolithic Society took infinite pains to equip itself with
finely ground tools, and possibly turned these tools to account
by using them as weapons in a struggle for existence with
Palaeolithic Man in which Homo Fictor went down and left
Homo Faber master of the field. In any case, the Palaeolithic
Society vanished away and the Neolithic Society reigned in its
stead; and this change, which inaugurates a striking improve¬
ment in terms of technique, is distinctly a set-back in terms of
Civilization. For the art of Upper Paleolithic Man died out with
him; and if Lower Neolithic Man had any glimmering of aes¬
thetic sense at all, at any rate he has given no material expres¬
sion to it. _
Another example of an improvement in technique being coin¬
cident with a set-back in Civilization is to be found in the inter¬
regnum in which the Minoan Civilization went into dissolution.
The Minoan Society had remained in the Bronze Age from be¬
ginning to end of its history. The latest and most barbarous
swarm of Continental European barbarians who descended

upon the derelict domain of the Minoan Society in the post-
Minoan Volkerwanderung came armed with weapons of iron
instead of bronze; and in their victorious onslaught upon the
epigoni of the Minoan Civilization they doubtless profited from
their acquaintance with the more potent metal. Yet this victory
of the iron-sworded ‘Dorians’ over the bronze-sworded Mino-
ans was a victory of Barbarism over Civilization. For an iron
sword—or, for that matter, a steel tank or submarine or bomb-
ing-plane or any other killing-machine of our latter-day Ma¬
chine Age—may be a talisman of victory without being a talis¬
man of culture. When the ‘Dorians’ adopted weapons of iron
instead of weapons of bronze, they did not cease to be bar¬
barians. And there is no reason for crediting these barbarians
even with the technical achievement of discovering a new and
better material for metallurgy. The ‘Dorian’ iron was probably
no ‘Dorian’ original discovery, but simply a ‘Dorian’ loan which
a geographical accident had put these barbarians in the way of
making by mimesis from the skilled artificers of a neighbouring
region. In this encounter between the ‘Dorians’ and the Mino-
ans, the technological criterion of progress in Civilization is
confuted by a reductio ad absurdum; for by the technological
criterion we are constrained to declare that the nadir of the
post-Minoan interregnum witnessed an advance in the culture
of the Aegean area; that this advance was more significant than
any which had been achieved in the whole history of the
Minoan Civilization; and that the advance was brought about
by the invading bands of iron-sworded ‘Dorians’ at the mo¬
ment when they were using their iron weapons to deal the
I bronze-sworded Minoan culture its death-blow.
J- This example from the history of the Old World has a par¬
allel in the history of the New World which is remarkably
The establishment of Mayan and Toltec chronology fixes,

within relatively narrow limits, the beginning of the metal age in
Central America and Mexico. No specimen of metal, not even a
copper stain, was observed during excavations at Copan, Quirigua
and other Mayan cities of the First Empire. Las Quebradas in
Guatemala was actually built upon a placer mine; yet, in the
sluicing operations which have almost destroyed the site, no speci¬
men of worked gold has been found. Nor are any ornaments of
metal, such as gorgets and bells, pictured on the early monuments.
We therefore conclude that the metal age did not begin till after
600 a.d.; yet by 1200 a.d. metal-work was highly developed in
gold, silver, copper and various alloys. Many specimens found at
Chichen Itza in Northern Yucatan are of Costa Rican and Colom¬
bian origin, and the technique of metal-working is the same from
Southern Colombia to Central Mexico. The art was apparently
introduced from South America about a.d. 1000 and underwent a
rapid growth in the five hundred years before the Spanish con¬
quest.1
It will be seen that this illustration of our thesis from Cen¬

tral America and the preceding illustration from the Aegean
throw some light upon one another. Just as in the Old World
the Minoan Society performed its achievements and lived out
its life without ever transcending the Bronze Age, so in the
New World the Mayan Society rose and fell without ever pass¬
ing out of the Stone Age into an age of metal. In Central
America, the introduction of the metallurgical technique was
reserved for two civilizations, both related to the Mayan, which
can neither of them compare with the antecedent civilization
in respect of the general level of their cultural attainments.
And, here again, the technological advance was synchronous
with a cultural interregnum.
If it be a reductio ad absurdum of the technological criterion
to claim that the second-rate civilizations which were affiliated
to the Mayan Civilization or the barbarian invaders of the
1 The Encyclopaedia Britannica: Thirteenth Edition, vol. 1, p. 195.
*34
Aegean World in the post-Minoan and pre-Hellenic interreg¬
num were apostles of Civilization in virtue of their prowess in
technique, it is amusing to find an equally extravagant claim
being submitted by the last of the great Hellenic historians on
behalf of the post-Hellenic interregnum on a similar techno¬
logical ground.
Procopius of Caesarea wrote a history of the wars of the
Roman Emperor Justinian (imperabat a.d. 527-65); and these
wars were actually the death of the ancient Hellenic Society.
In obstinately striving to realize his misguided ambition of re¬
storing the territorial integrity of the Empire, Justinian brought
financial ruin upon the Oriental provinces, depopulation upon
the Balkan provinces, and devastation upon Italy; and even at
that price he failed to achieve his ‘single-track’ aim; for in ex¬
tirpating the Vandals in Africa he was clearing the way for the
Moors to take their place, and in extirpating the Ostrogoths in
Italy he was creating a vacuum which was to be filled, within
three years of his own death, by the far more barbarous Lom¬
bards. The century which followed the wars of Justinian was
actually the nadir of the post-Hellenic interregnum. This was
the tragedy of the generation of Procopius, as posterity can see
it in retrospect; and indeed it was painfully apparent at the
time, and was widely recognized by Procopius’ own contem¬
poraries, that—however far off or near at hand the end of Hel¬
lenism might be—Hellenic history had long passed its zenith.
Yet in writing the preface to his narrative of the fatal events
which had just dealt Hellenism its death-blow before he took
up his pen, the eminent historian goes out of his way to break
a lance in a battle of his own seeking between the Moderns
and the Ancients; and he awards the palm to the Moderns on
the score of their technical superiority in the art of war.
To an unprejudiced mind it will be evident that the events of

these wars are at least as striking and imposing as any in history.
They have been responsible for occurrences of a more extraordi¬

nary character than any of which a record survives, except (pos¬
sibly) from the point of view of a reader who insists upon giving
the palm to Antiquity and refuses to be impressed by anything in
the contemporary world. The first example that occurs to my
mind is the affectation of alluding to modern troops as ‘archers’ and
reserving such appellations as ‘hand-to-hand combatants or men-
at-arms’ for the warriors of Antiquity, in the confident assump¬
tion that in our day these military qualities are extinct. Such as¬
sumptions merely betray a superficiality and an utter lack °f ex¬
perience in those who make them. It has never crossed their minds
that the archers in Homer, whose arm is cast up against them as an
opprobrious epithet, had no horse-flesh between their knees, no
lance in hand, and no shield or body-armour to cover them.
They went into action on foot and were compelled to take cover,
either by posting themselves behind the shield of a comrade or by
‘leaning against a tombstone’-a position which precluded them
equally from extricating themselves in defeat and from pursuing a
retreating enemy, and, above all, from fighting in the open. Hence
their reputation for playing an underhand part in the game o
war; while, apart from that, they took so little pains with their
technique that, in shooting, they only drew the bow-string to the
breast with the natural result that the missile was spent and in¬
effective by the time when it reached its target. This was un¬
doubtedly the level at which archery stood in earlier times. By
contrast, modern archers go into action equipped with grasses
and knee-boots and with their quiver on their right side and their
sword on the other, while some troopers have a lance slung over
their shoulders and a small handleless shield of just sufficient diam¬
eter to cover the face and neck. Being admirable horsemen, they
are trained to bend their bow without effort to either flank w en
going at full gallop, and to hit a pursuing enemy m the1^ re^
well as a retreating enemy to their front. They draw e
string to the face, to the level (approximately) of the right ear,
which imparts such force to the missile that its impact is invariably
fatal and that neither shield nor cuirass can resist its momentum.
Some people, however, who choose to ignore the existence o
these troops, persist in an open-mouthed adulation o ntiqmty
and refuse to admit the superiority of modern inventions. Mis-
conceptions of this kind are, of course, powerless to rob the late

wars of their superlative interest and importance.
Procopius’ argument is an extravaganza which refutes itself;

and the only comment that it seems necessary to make is that
the cataphract, whom Procopius presents to his readers as the
chef cT oeuvre of Greek and Roman military technique—the
most efficient type of fighting-man that had ever been thrown
up in the Hellenic World during the long span of time between
the Homeric Age and the author’s own day—was actually no
more an original creation of the Greek or the Roman military
genius than iron was a discovery of the ‘Dorians.’ This horse-
archer—armed cap-a-pie and formidable by reason of his per¬
sonal prowess in riding and shooting—was utterly alien from
the genuine Greek and Roman military tradition, which had
relegated its cavalry to a subordinate role and had put its trust
in an infantry whose strength lay in the corporate cohesion
and discipline of the regiment far more than in the equipment
or expertise of the individual soldier. In the Roman army, the
cataphract was a recent innovation—an arm which had not been
adopted more than a couple of centuries before Procopius’
own day—and, if this arm had come to be the mainstay of Ro¬
man military power within that relatively short period of time,
this revolution in military technique bears witness to the his¬
toric Roman infantry’s rapid and lamentable decay. In fact, in
the Roman army of Procopius’ day the cataphract filled a
vacuum which had been of the cataphract’s own making; for
the previously invincible Roman infantryman had first met his
match, and finally acknowledged his superior, in the cata¬
phract whom he encountered on the Mesopotamian plains in
the armies of the Arsacidae and the Sasanidae, and on the
Danubian plains in the war-bands of the Sarmatians and the
PRICE OF PROGRESS IN MILITARY TECHNIQUE I37
Goths. The military lessons of a long trial of strength between

the legionary and the cataphract, which had begun with Cras-
sus’ disaster at Carrhae in 53 b.c. and had culminated in Valens’
disaster at Adrianople in a.d. 378, had ultimately led the Roman
authorities to discard the historic Roman infantryman—through
whose sword and trenching-tool Dea Roma had originally won
her Empire—and to adopt the exotic but triumphant Oriental
cataphract in the legionary’s stead.
In his eulogy of the cataphract, Procopius is thus really doing
just the opposite of what he supposes and intends. Instead of
celebrating an improvement of the Greek and Roman military
technique, he is pronouncing its funeral oration. Yet, although
Procopius has chosen an unfortunate illustration of the point
that he is seeking to make, his general contention that there has
been a progressive improvement in Hellenic technique remains
broadly true within the field of military technique to which he
confines his argument. In surveying this field of Greek and
Roman social history, let us rule out of account the spurious
epilogue represented by the cataphract and confine our survey
to the thousand years which began with the invention of the
Spartan phalanx in the Second Messeno-Spartan War in the lat¬
ter part of the seventh century b.c. and which ended with the
final discomfiture and discrediting of the Roman legion at the
Battle of Adrianople in a.d. 378. The development of the genu¬
inely Hellenic military technique can be traced, without any
break in continuity, throughout these thousand years; and in
tracing it we shall find that an arrest or a set-back in the Hel¬
lenic Civilization invariably accompanied an improvement in
the Hellenic art of war.
To begin with, as we have seen already, the invention of the
Spartan phalanx, which is the first signal improvement of which
we have a record, was an outcome of the same events that
I38 WAR AND CIVILIZATION
brought the growth of the Spartan version of the Hellenic

Civilization to a premature halt.
The next signal improvement was the differentiation of the
Hellenic infantryman into two extreme types: the Macedonian
phalangite and the Athenian peltast. The Macedonian phalanx,
armed with long two-handed pikes in place of short one-
handed stabbing-spears, was more formidable in its impact than
its Spartan precursor; but it was also more unwieldy in its
manoeuvres and more at the enemy’s mercy if once it lost its
formation; and therefore it could not safely go into action un¬
less its flanks were guarded by peltasts: a new type of light
infantry who were taken out of the ranks and trained to fight
as skirmishers. In collaboration, the Macedonian phalangite and
the Athenian peltast were a far more effective type of infantry
than the old undifferentiated phalangite on the Spartan model;
and this second improvement in the Hellenic military technique
was the outcome of a century of internecine warfare in the
Hellenic World—the century running from the outbreak of the
Atheno-Peloponnesian War in 431 b.c. to the Macedonian vic¬
tory at Chaeronea in 338—which saw the Hellenic Civilization
break down and go into disintegration.
The next signal improvement in the Hellenic military tech¬
nique was made by the Romans, when they succeeded in com¬
bining the advantages and avoiding the defects of both peltast
and phalangite in the tactics and equipment of the legionary.
The legionary was armed with a couple of throwing-spears and
a stabbing-sword, and the legion went into action in open
order in two waves, with a third wave—armed and ordered in
the old-fashioned phalanx-style-in reserve. This third improve¬
ment in the Hellenic military technique was the outcome of a
fresh bout of internecine warfare—beginning with the out¬
break of the Hannibalic War in 218 b. c. and closing with the
end of the Third Romano-Macedonian War in 168-in which
the Romans delivered a ‘knock-out blow’ to every other Great

Power in the Hellenic World of that age.
The fourth and last improvement was the perfection of the
legion: a process, begun by Marius and completed by Caesar,
which was the outcome of a century of Roman revolutions and
civil wars. The Roman legionary was probably at his best in
the army which fought for Caesar at Pharsalus in 48 b.c.—five
years after the legions which had fought for Crassus at Carrhae
in 53 b.c. had met their match in the Parthian cataphracts.
Thus the generation of Caesar and Crassus saw the Greek and
Roman military technique both attain and pass its zenith. And
the same generation saw the Hellenic Civilization enter upon
the penultimate stage in its decline and fall. For that century
of Roman revolutions and civil wars which had begun in 133
b.c. with the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus had been the cli¬
max of the Hellenic ‘Time of Troubles ; and it was Caesar s
mission to bring that ‘Time of Troubles’ to a close by inaugu¬
rating the universal state which Augustus eventually established
after the Battle of Actium.
In this history of the successive improvements in the Hel¬
lenic art of war, we have a clear case in which it is not the
growth of a civilization, but its arrest and breakdown and dis¬
integration, that goes hand in hand with the improvements in
its military technique; and the histories of the Babylonic and
Sinic Civilizations offer us equally good illustrations of the
same phenomenon. Both in the Babylonic Time of Troubles,
when the Babylonic Society was tearing itself to pieces in the
frenzy of Assyrian militarism, and likewise in the Sinic Time
of Troubles,’ when the military Power of Ts’in was delivering
‘knock-out blows’ to the other contending states of the Sinic
World, conspicuous improvements in military technique were
accomplished. In both cases, for example, the old-fashioned use
of the war-horse as a draught-animal to draw a chariot was dis-
carded in favour of its more effective use as a mount for a

cavalryman. Perhaps we may infer from the foregoing survey
that an improvement in military technique is usually, if not in¬
variably, the symptom of a decline in Civilization.
An Englishman of the generation that has lived through the
General War of 1914-18 may remind himself, in this con¬
nection, of an incident which struck him, at the time, as pain¬
fully symbolic. As the War, in its ever-increasing intensity,
made wider and wider demands upon the lives of the belliger¬
ent nations-like some great river that has burst its bounds in
flood and is engulfing field after field and sweeping away vil¬
lage after village-a moment came in England when the offices
of the Board of Education in Wfiitehall were commandeered for
the use of a new department of the War Office which had been
improvised in order to make an intensive study of trench war¬
fare. The ejected Board of Education found asylum in the Vic¬
toria and Albert Museum, where it survived on sufferance as
though it had been some curious relic of a vanished past. And
thus, for several years before the Armistice of the nth No¬
vember, 1918, an education for slaughter was being promoted,
in the heart of our Western World, within the walls of a public
building which had been erected in order to assist in promot¬
ing an education for life. As the writer of this volume was
walking down Whitehall one day in the spring of that year
1918, he found himself repeating a passage from the Gospel
according to Saint Matthew:
When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation,

spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso
readeth, let him understand), . . . then shall be great tribulation,
such as was not since the beginning of the World to this time . . ]
And, except those days should be shortened, there should no
flesh be saved . . .
No reader can fail to understand that when the Ministry of

Education of a great Western country is given over to the
study of the art of war, the improvement in our Western mili¬
tary technique which is purchased at such a price is synony¬
mous with the destruction of our Western Civilization.
CHAPTER IX
The Failure of the Saviour with the Sword
The would-be saviour of a disintegrating society is necessarily

a saviour with a sword; but a sword may be either drawn or
sheathed, and the swordsman may be discovered in either of
two corresponding postures. Either he may be laying about
him with naked weapon in hand, like the Gods in combat with
the Giants as they are depicted on the Delphic or on the
Pergamene frieze, or else he may be sitting in state, with his
blade out of sight in its scabbard, as a victor who has ‘put all
enemies under his feet.’ The second of these postures is the
end towards which the first is a means; and, though a David or
a Herakles, who never rests from his labours until he dies in
amess, may be a more romantic figure than a Solomon in all
his glory or a Zeus in all his majesty, the labours of Herakles
and the wars of David would be aimless exertions if the seren¬
ity of Zeus and the prosperity of Solomon were not their
objectives. The sword is only wielded in the hope of being
able to use it to such good purpose that it may eventually have
no more work to do; but this hope is an illusion; for it is only
m fairyland that swords cut Gordian knots which cannot be
untied by fingers. ‘AH they that take the sword shall perish
with the sword’ is the inexorable law of real life; and the
swordsman’s belief in a conclusive victory is an illusion. While
David may never be allowed to build the Temple, Solomon’s
building is built only to be burnt by Nebuchadnezzar; and,
FAILURE OF THE SAVIOUR WITH THE SWORD 143
while Herakles may never win his way in this life to the
heights of Olympus, Zeus plants his throne upon the formi¬
dable mountain’s summit only to court the doom of being
hurled in his turn into the abyss into which his own hands
have already cast the Titans.
Why is it that a disintegrating society cannot, after all, be
saved by the sword even when the swordsman is genuinely
eager to return the weapon to its scabbard at the earliest pos¬
sible moment and to keep it there-unused and unseen-for the
longest possible period of time? Is not this twofold action of
drawing and sheathing again a sign of grace which ought to
have its reward? The warrior who is willing to renounce, at
the first opportunity, the use of an instrument which he is
only able now to lay aside because he has just used it so suc¬
cessfully must be a victor who is also a statesman, and a states¬
man who is something of a sage. He must have a large measure
of saving common sense and at least a grain of the more
etherial virtue of self-control. The renunciation of War as an
instrument of policy is a resolution which promises to be as
fruitful as it is noble and wise; and, whenever it is taken with
sincerity, it always arouses high hopes.
Why are these seemingly legitimate expectations doomed to
be disappointed-as they were in the signal failure of the Pax
Augusta to achieve the perpetuity that was hoped for rt. Is
there, then, ‘no place of repentance'? Can the Triumvir who
has once perpetrated, and profited by, the proscnpttons never
truly transfigure himself into a Pater Patriae? The answer to
this agonizing question has been given in an Horatian ode by
an English poet upon the return of a Western Caesar from a
victorious campaign in which the victor seemed at last to have
triumphantly completed his military task. A poem which pur¬
ports to be a paean in honour of a particular victory sounds the
knell of all Militarism in its last two stanzas:
H4 WAR AND CIVILIZATION
But thou, the War’s and Fortune’s son,

March indefatigably on;
And, for the last effect,
Still keep the sword erect.
Besides the force it has to fright

The spirits of the shady night,
The same arts that did gain
A power, must it maintain.1
This classically phrased verdict upon the career of the ear¬

liest would-be saviour with the sword in the modern history of
our Western Civilization has a sting in its tail which pricks
with a still sharper point in the nineteenth-century mot that
the one thing which you cannot do with bayonets is to sit on
them.’ An instrument that has once been used to destroy life
cannot then be used to preserve life at the user’s convenience.
The function of weapons is to kill; and a ruler who has not
scrupled to ‘wade through slaughter to a throne’ will find-if he
tries to maintain his power thereafter without further recourse
to the grim arts which have gained it—that sooner or later he
will be confronted with a choice between letting the power
slip through his fingers or else renewing his lease of it by means
of another bout of bloodshed. The man of violence cannot
both genuinely repent of his violence and permanently profit
by it. The law of karma is not evaded so easily as that. The
saviour with the sword may perhaps build a house upon the
sand but never the house upon a rock. And he will not be able
to build for Eternity vicariously by the expedient of a division
of labour between a blood-guilty David and an innocent Solo¬
mon; for the stones with which Solomon builds will have been
of David’s hewing; and the veto pronounced against the father
-‘Thou shalt not build an house for my name because thou hast
1 Andrew Marvell: An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from
been a man of war and hast shed blood’—spells doom for a
house built by the son on the father’s behalf.

This ultimate failure of all attempts to win salvation with
the sword is not only proclaimed in poetry and myth and leg¬
end; it is also demonstrated in history; for ‘the iniquity of the
fathers’ who have had recourse to the sword is visited ‘upon
the children unto the third and fourth generation.’ In our own
day the descendants of the Protestant English military colonists
whom Cromwell planted in Ireland to hold a conquered Catho¬
lic country down have been evicted from their ancestors’ ill-
gotten estates by the very weapons of violence and injustice to
which they owed their cursed heritage; and, in 1937, the
wealth of a British community of business men in a treaty-port
and settlement at Shanghai which had been founded on the
iniquity of ‘the Opium War’ of a.d. 1840-42 was being de¬
stroyed by Japanese and Chinese hands which had been
schooled in Militarism by the example of past British success in
temporarily transmuting military violence into commercial
profit. Nor are these two judgements of History exceptional.
The classic saviours with the sword have been the captains and
the princes who have striven to found or have succeeded in
founding or have succeeded in preserving or have striven to
preserve the universal states into which the disintegrating civi¬
lizations pass when they have lived through their Times of
Troubles’ to the bitter end; and, although the passage from
‘Time of Troubles’ to universal state is apt to bring with it so
great an immediate relief for the tormented children of a dis¬
integrating society that they sometimes show their gratitude to
the successful founder of a universal state by worshipping him
as a god, we shall find, when we come to study these universal
states more closely, that they are at best ephemeral, and that
if, by a tour de force, they obstinately outlive their norma
span they have to pay for this unnatural longevity by degener-
ating into social enormities which are as pernicious in their way

as either the ‘Times of Troubles’ that precede the establish¬
ment of universal states or the interregna that follow their
break-up at the normal age.
The association between the histories of universal states and
the careers of would-be saviours with the sword does not merely
testify in a general way to the inefficacy of force as an instru¬
ment of salvation: it enables us to survey the evidence empiri¬
cally by giving us a convenient clue for sorting out the
would-be saviours of this kind and marshalling them in an order
in which it becomes possible to pass them in review.
The first to march past will be the tragic battalion of would-be
saviours with the sword who have slashed—with blades as futile
as the Danaids’ sieves-at the welling wars of a ‘Time of
Troubles.’
In the Hellenic Time of Troubles’ (circa 431—31 b.c.) we
can perceive, in the first generation, the gallant figure of a
Lacedaemonian Brasidas giving his life to liberate the Greek
city-states in Chalcidice from an Athenian yoke—only to have
his work undone within less than half a century by other
Lacedaemonian hands which were to open the way for a
Philip of Macedon to place a heavier yoke upon the neck of
every state in Hellas save Sparta herself. At Brasidas’ heels stalks
the sinister figure of his countryman and contemporary, Lysan-
der, who successfully liberated the Greek city-states along the
Asiatic shores of the Aegean and gave the Athenian ‘thalassoc-
racy its coup de grace—only to bring upon the former subjects
of Athens the chastisement of Lacedaemonian scorpions in
place of Attic whips and to set his own country’s feet upon a
path that was to lead her, in thirty-three years, from Aegos-
potami to Leuctra. Thereafter each successive generation adds
some figure to our parade. We see a Theban Epaminondas
liberating the Arcadians and Messenians and punishing Sparta
as Lysander had punished Athens—only to stimulate the Pho-

cians to inflict the same punishment on Thebes herself. We see
a Macedonian Philip ridding Hellas of the Phocian scourge and
being hailed as ‘friend, benefactor, and saviour’ by the The¬
bans and Thessalians who had been the principal sufferers from
it—only to extinguish the freedom of these two Hellenic peoples
that once had been so naive as to ‘think the whole world of
him.’ And we see an Alexander seeking to reconcile the Hel¬
lenes to a Macedonian hegemony by leading them on the quest
of making a common prize of the entire Achaemenian Empire
—only to lose for Macedon the hegemony which his father had
won for her, and to feed the flames of Hellenic civil war by
pouring into the rival war-chests of his own successors a treas¬
ure which the Achaemenidae had been accumulating for two
centuries.
A parallel and contemporary procession of unsuccessful
saviours with the sword can be observed in that other half of
the Hellenic World which lay to the west of the Adriatic. We
have only to recite the catalogue of their names—Dionysius the
First and Dionysius the Second, Agathocles and Hiero and
Hieronymus—in order to perceive that the failure of each of
these dictators in turn is proclaimed in the bare fact of his
needing a successor to grapple with the same task all over again.
The problem of saving Hellenism in the West by establishing
an union sacree which would be strong enough to resist the
dual pressure of Syriac rivals from Africa and barbarian inter¬
lopers from Italy remained unsolved until the fertile seed-bed
of Hellenic culture in Sicily was devastated by being turned
into the arena of a struggle for oecumenical dominion between
Carthage and Rome.
In the Orthodox Christian World the same battalion of
would-be saviours is represented by figures who are more sym¬
pathetic without being more effective. In the main body of
Orthodox Christendom we see Alexius Comnenus (imperabat

a.d. 1081-1118) snatching a prostrate East Roman Empire out
of the jaws of Normans and Saljuqs with all the intrepidity of
a David rescuing his lamb from the lion and the bear. And a
century later we see a Theodore Lascaris refusing to despair of
the republic after the unprecedented and overwhelming catas¬
trophe of a.d. 1204, and turning at bay, behind the walls of
Nicaea, against the Frankish conquerors of the holy city of
Constantine. But all this Byzantine heroism was in vain. For in
the tragic history of the East Roman Empire the French Goli¬
ath who came prowling on the Fourth Crusade did not, after
all, share the fate of the Norman bear and the Saljuq lion; and
the eventual recapture of Constantinople by Michael Palaeo-
logus, which seemed at the moment to have crowned Theodore
Lascaris’ work with a posthumous success, proved in the sequel
only to have sealed the East Roman Empire’s doom by showing
the ’Osmanlis the way from the Asiatic to the European side
of the Black Sea Straits. In the history of the Russian offshoot of
the Orthodox Christian Society we may discern counterparts
of an Alexius Comnenus and a Theodore Lascaris in Alexander
Nevski (regnabat a.d. 1252-63) and Dmitri Donskoi (regnabat
a.d. 1362-89), who wielded their swords for the salvation of
the Russian World, during its separate ‘Time of Troubles’
(circa a.d. 1078-1478), from the simultaneous assaults of Lithu¬
anian pagans and Teutonic Crusaders on the north-west and
of Mongol Nomads on the south-east. These Russian heroes
of Orthodox Christendom were happier in their generation
than their Greek peers, since the fort which they held so
valiantly against such heavy odds was not, in the next chap¬
ter of the story, to fall into alien hands. Yet Alexander and
Dmitri were no more successful than Alexius or Theodore in
fulfilling their personal task of bringing a ‘Time of Troubles’
to an end.
These saviours with the sword whose lot has fallen in ‘Times
of Troubles’ are patently cast in the mould of Herakles with¬
out a touch of Zeus; but the next battalion that comes march¬
ing at their heels consists of half-castes between the Herculean
and the Jovian type who are not dispensed from performing
Hercules’ labours but are also not condemned to perform them
without any hope of obtaining Jove’s reward. These Jovian
Herculeses or Herculean Joves are the forerunners of the suc¬
cessful founders of universal states. They play the part of a
Moses to a Joshua or an Elias to a mundane Messiah or a John
the Baptist to a Christ (if the would-be saviours of a mundane
society may properly be brought into comparison with the
harbingers of a kingdom which is not of This World). Some
of these forerunners die without passing over Jordan or obtain¬
ing more than a Pisgah-sight of the Promised Land, while there
are others who succeed in forcing the passage and in momen¬
tarily planting the standard of their kingdom on the farther
bank; but these audacious spirits who seek to wrest a prema¬
ture success out of the hands of a reluctant Destiny are visited,
for their temerity, with a punishment that is escaped by their
peers who recognize, and bow to, their fate; for the universal
states which they prematurely set up collapse, like houses of
cards, as swiftly as they have been erected; and the jerry-build¬
ers’ abortive labours only find a place in history as a foil to dis¬
play the solidity of the work of successors who retrieve the
disaster by rebuilding the fallen edifice in granite instead of
pasteboard.
The Moses who dies in the Wilderness is represented in Hel¬
lenic history by a Marius, who showed the way for a Julius to
follow in the next generation, though Marius’ own hesitant
and clumsy moves towards the establishment of an egalitarian
dictatorship not only failed to introduce a reign of order but
grievously aggravated an existing state of anarchy. In the main
!5o WAR AND CIVILIZATION
body of Orthodox Christendom the ’Osmanli Bayezld Yilderim

came within an ace of anticipating Mehmed the Conqueror’s
double achievement of capturing Constantinople and settling
scores with Qaraman, when ‘the Thunderbolt’ was blasted in
mid-action by the sudden and irresistible impact of a still
mightier military force.
Next to this vanguard who see, but never set foot on, the
Promised Land comes a second company of forerunners who
momentarily subdue the monster of anarchy—but this not so
decisively that he cannot raise his head or show his teeth again.
In the Hellenic World a Pompey and a Caesar divided be¬
tween them the task of reforming a Roman anarchy into a
Roman Peace—only to share the guilt of undoing their com¬
mon work by turning their arms against each other. The rival
war-lords condemned a world which it was their joint mission
to save to be scarified by another bout of Roman civil war; and
the victor triumphed only to be ‘rejected,’ like Esau, ‘when he
would have inherited the blessing,’ and to find ‘no place of re¬
pentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.’ Caesar did
not expiate the deaths of Pompey and Cato by his famous
clemency in the hour of his apparent omnipotence. The slayer
who had stayed his sword from further slaughter had never¬
theless to die by the daggers of defeated adversaries whose lives
he had spared; and in dying this tragic death Caesar bequeathed
yet another bout of civil war as his unwilled legacy to a pite¬
ous world which he had sincerely desired to save. The sword
had to take a further toll of life and happiness before the task
which Caesar and Pompey had so lightly thrown to the winds
was well and truly executed at last by Caesar’s adopted son.
Augustus did succeed, after the overthrow of the last of his
adversaries, in demobilizing the swollen armies that were left
on his hands on the morrow of the Battle of Actium.
In Syriac history Divus Julius has his counterpart in Cyrus,
the would-be bringer of a Pax Achaemenia to a world that had

been lacerated by a furor Assyriacus. It was in vain that Cyrus
(as the story goes) paid heed to the sign sent from Heaven by
Apollo and repented of the evil that he thought to do unto
Croesus. Instead of burning his vanquished adversary alive,
Cyrus took Croesus for his trusted counsellor—only (according
to the Herodotean tale) to lose his life, years afterwards,
through acting on bad advice which Croesus had given him in
good faith. The last word on Cyrus’ career was spoken by the
queen of the Nomads when she promised to satisfy the Persian
war-lord’s insatiable appetite for blood; and Tomyris duly car¬
ried out her threat on the stricken field by filling a wine-skin
with the blood of the slain and dabbling in it the lips of Cyrus
corpse. Nor was it only Cyrus himself who perished by the
stroke of the weapon which he had drawn; for the death of
the Achaemenid empire-builder was capped by the collapse of
his imposing edifice. Cambyses played the same havoc with
Cyrus’ Fax Achaemenia as a Gaius and a Nero played with
Octavian’s Fax Augusta; and Darius had to salvage Cyrus’
ruined work, as Vespasian salvaged Augustus’.
In the same Syriac World more than a thousand years later,
when the Arab war-lord ’Umar brought a long interlude of
Hellenic intrusion to a tardy end by emulating the Persian war¬
lord Cyrus’ lightning-swift feats of conquest, the captor of
Jerusalem showed the same clemency as the captor of Sardis-
only to demonstrate once again that, for the would-be saviour
with the sword, there is ‘no place of repentance.’ Once again a
sword-built edifice collapsed as soon as the builder s sword-arm
had been put out of action. After ’Umar’s death his work-like
Cyrus’—was first shamefully wrecked and then brilliantly sal-
vaged-though, in the history of the Caliphate, Cambyses’ and
Darius’ roles were both of them played, turn and turn about,
by the versatile genius of a single Arab statesman. Mu’awiyah
*52 WAR AND CIVILIZATION
coldly condemned a world that had just been exhausted by the

last round of an inconclusive struggle between Rome and Per¬
sia to be further harried by an Arab civil war in order that the
astute Umayyad might filch the political heritage of the Prophet
Muhammad out of the incompetent hands of the Prophet’s own
cousin and son-in-law.
There is, however, a third company in our battalion of fore¬
runners, and this is composed of Herculeses who hand on to
successors the fruits of their own labours without ever tasting
these fruits for themselves, but also without any break or set¬
back. In the Babylonic World, Nabopolassar (imperabat 626-
605 b.c.) spent his life in compassing the death of the Assyrian
tiger in order that Nebuchadnezzar (imperabat 605-562 b.c.)
might sit, unchallenged, on the throne of a Neo-Babylonian
Empire which could not stand secure until Nineveh lay in
ruins.
To the eyes of an historian of a later age, who can see the
careers of the founders of universal states in the light of a dis¬
tant sequel, their Jovian figures do not stand out as being strik-
ingly different from the Herculean figures of their predeces¬
sors. But to the eyes of a contemporary observer, who cannot
see things in perspective, there seems to be all the difference
here between failure and success. The founders of the universal
states appear at the moment to have triumphantly achieved a
success which their predecessors have striven for manfully but
in vain; and the genuineness of this success appears to be guar¬
anteed not merely by the effectiveness of the founders’ own
lives and deeds (however eloquently these facts may speak),
but most decisively of all by the prosperity of the founders’
successors. Solomon’s glory is the most telling evidence for
David’s prowess. Let us therefore now continue our survey of
saviours with the sword by passing in review these Solomons
who are born into the purple. The swords of the porphyro-
geniti are speciously muffled in the folds of an imperial robe;

and, if ever we see them show their true colours by displaying
the hidden blade, we shall always find that this act of self¬
betrayal has been prompted by wantonness and not enjoined
by necessity. If salvation with the sword is to be ‘justified of
her children,’ it must be now, in this Solomonian generation, or
never in the whole history of the disintegrations of civilizations.
So let us inspect our Solomons closely.
The reigns of these Solomons constitute those relatively
happy periods of partial peace and prosperity which look like
‘Golden Ages’ if we confine our view to the life-spans of the
universal states in which they occur, but which can be seen to
be really ‘Indian Summers’ as soon as we extend our field of
vision to include the whole life-span of the civilization in whose
history the coming and going of a universal state is only one of
a number of incidents in a long tale of disintegration. An em¬
pirical survey of these ‘Indian Summers’ will bring out two
salient features of this historical phenomenon. We shall find
that they display a striking uniformity of character combined
with an equally striking inequality of duration.
The Hellenic ‘Indian Summer’ began at the accession of the
Emperor Nerva in a.d. 96 and ended at the death of the Em
peror Marcus in a.d. 180; and these eighty-four years amount
to not much less than a quarter of the total duration of a Pax
Romana which, in the terms of the conventional chronology
which dates by public events, may be reckoned to have begun
in 31 b.c., on the morrow of the Battle of Actium, and to have
ended in a.d. 378, on the day of the Battle of Adrianople. In
the history of the Egyptiac Society the ‘Indian Summer of the
New Empire’ lasted longer-from the accession of Thoth-
mes I, circa 1545 b.c., to the death of Amenhotep III in 1376 b.c.
But both these spans are surpassed in the duration of the ‘Indian
Summer’ of ‘the Middle Empire,’ which was the original Egyp-
r54 WAR AND CIVILIZATION
tiac universal state; for this first Egyptiac ‘Indian Summer’ was
almost coeval with the Twelfth Dynasty, which reigned, from
first to last, circa 2000-1788 b.c.; and, even if we date the onset
of winter from the death of Amenemhat III in 1801 b.c., the
spell of sunshine covers half the total duration of a Pax The-
bana that lasted in all for about four centuries, if its beginning
is to be equated with the accession of Mentuhotep IV, circa
2070-2060 b.c., and its end with the eruption of the Hyksos,
circa 1660 b.c.
These ‘Indian Summers’ that have lasted through successive

reigns, and in at least one case for almost the whole period of
a dynasty, differ notably in length from other ‘Indian Sum¬
mers’ which are also manifestly authentic examples of the same
social phenomenon, but which have not outlasted the reign of
some single sovereign with whose name they are identified. In
the history of the Arab Caliphate the celebrated ‘Indian Sum¬
mer’ in the reign of Harun-ar-Rashid (imperabat a.d. 786-809)
shines out so brilliantly thanks to the depth of the darkness in
which this pool of light is framed. The splendours of an ’Ab-
basid Caliph who was profiting by the cumulative results of the
labours of a long line of Umayyad predecessors are set off on
the one hand by an antecedent bout of anarchy in which
Harun’s ’Abbasid forebears had wrested the Caliphate out of
the Umayyads grasp, and on the other hand by a subsequent
debacle, in which Harun’s ’Abassid successors fell into a humili¬
ating bondage to their own Turkish body-guard.
In the main body of Orthodox Christendom the Pax Otto-
manica produced its ‘Indian Summer’ in the reign of Suleyman
the Magnificent (imperabat a.d. i52o-66)-an ’Osmanli prince
who emulated ‘in real life’ the legendary glory of his Davidic
namesake. Suleyman’s Western contemporaries were affected
like the Queen of Sheba by the vastness of this latter-day Solo¬
mon s dominions and the abundance of his wealth and the gran-
FAILURE OF THE SAVIOUR WITH THE SWORD 15 5
deur of his buildings; ‘there was no more spirit in’ them. Yet
the curse which the biblical Solomon lived to bring down on
himself was also incurred by Suleyman. ‘The Lord said unto
Solomon: “Forasmuch as this is done of thee, and thou hast not
kept my covenant and my statutes which I have commanded
thee, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee and will give it
to thy servant.” ’ Suleyman the Magnificent was the Ottoman
Padishah who sapped the foundations of the Ottoman social
system by making the first breach in the fundamental rule that
the Padishah’s Slave-Household must be recruited from persons
who were infidel-born, and that Muslim freemen should be
ineligible for enlistment ex officio religionis. In tolerating the
enrolment of Janissaries’ sons among the ’Ajem-oghlans, Suley¬
man opened the flood-gates for a disastrous dilution of the
Janissary Corps; and this self-inflicted catastrophe duly rent
the kingdom from the ’Osmanli Padishah and gave it to his
‘human cattle’ the ra‘iyeh.
If we now turn our eyes from the main body of Orthodox
Christendom to its offshoot in Russia, we may hesitate at first
sight to recognize a counterpart of Suleyman the Magnificent
in his contemporary Ivan the Terrible (imperabat a.d. 1533-84).
Are a reign of terror and an ‘Indian Summer’ compatible? The
two atmospheres will strike us as being so sharply antipathetic
to one another that we may question the possibility of their
co-existing in a single place and time. Yet the record of Ivan
the Terrible’s achievements may compel us to admit that his
reign was an ‘Indian Summer’ of a sort; for this was the reign
which saw the prince of Muscovy assume the style and title of
an East Roman Emperor and justify this audacity by the con¬
quest of Qazan and Astrakhan and the opening-up of the
White Sea and Siberia. This was assuredly an ‘Indian Summer,’
albeit with thunder in the air; and this reading of Ivan the Ter¬
rible’s reign is confirmed by the sequel. Before the Emperor’s
death a shadow was thrown athwart the sinister sunlight of his

reign by the outcome of a war for the acquisition of a sea¬
board on the Baltic which dragged on even longer than the war
subsequently waged for the same purpose by Peter the Great,
but which ended in a miserable failure that was at the opposite
pole from Peter’s brilliant success. And when Ivan had gone to
his account the strokes of misfortune fell thick and fast upon
the body politic which he left behind him. The year 1598 saw
the extinction of the House of Rurik, and the years 1604-13
saw a temporary collapse of the Russian Orthodox Christian
universal state from which it did not fully recover till the reign
of Peter the Great.
If we now glance back at our catalogue of ‘Indian Summers’
that have endured for longer than a single reign, we shall ob¬
serve that these too, for all their staying-power, have suc¬
cumbed to the onset of winter in the end. In the Hellenic
World Marcus was followed by Commodus, and Alexander
Severus by ‘the Thirty Tyrants.’ In the Egyptiac World in the
days of ‘the New Empire’ Amenhotep III was followed by an
Amenhotep IV who has made himself notorious under his self-
chosen title of Ikhnaton, while in the days of ‘the Middle Em¬
pire’ the long series of majestically alternating Amenemhats
and Senwosrets gave way at last to a dynasty in which no
fewer than thirteen ephemeral emperors successively seized and
lost the Imperial Throne within the brief span of a quarter of a
century.
Our survey of ‘Indian Summers’ has thus, it would appear,
been leading us to the conclusion that the careers of the Solo¬
mons decisively refute, instead of decisively vindicating, the
claim of the sword to be convertible into an instrument of sal¬
vation; for, whether an ‘Indian Summer’ lasts out the life of a
dynasty or comes and goes within the briefer span of a single
reign, we have seen that it is in any case essentially something
transitory. The glory of Solomon is a glory that fades; and, if

Solomon is a failure, then David—and David’s forerunners—
have wielded their swords in vain. The truth seems to be that
a sword which has once drunk blood cannot be permanently
restrained from drinking blood again, any more than a tiger
who has once tasted human flesh can be prevented from be¬
coming a man-eater from that time onwards. The man-eating
tiger is, no doubt, a tiger doomed to death; if he escapes the
bullet he will die of the mange. Yet, even if the tiger could
foresee his doom, he would probably be unable to subdue the
devouring appetite which his first taste of man-meat has awak¬
ened in his maw; and so it is with a society that has once sought
salvation through the sword. Its leaders may repent of their
butcher’s work; they may show mercy on their enemies, like
Caesar, and demobilize their armies, like Augustus; and, as they
ruefully hide the sword away, they may resolve in complete
good faith that they will never draw it again except for the
assuredly beneficent, and therefore legitimate, purpose of pre¬
serving the peace against criminals still at large within the bor¬
ders of their tardily established universal state or against bar¬
barians still recalcitrant in the outer darkness. They may clinch
this resolution with an oath and reinforce it with an exorcism;
and for a season they may appear to have successfully achieved
the pious tour de jorce of bitting and bridling Murder and har¬
nessing him to the chariot of Life; yet, though their fair-
seeming Fax Oecumenica may stand steady on its grim founda¬
tion of buried sword-blades for thirty or a hundred or two
hundred years, Time sooner or later will bring their work to
naught.
Time is, indeed, working against these unhappy empire-
builders from the outset; for sword-blades are foundations that
never settle. Exposed or buried, these blood-stained weapons
still retain their sinister charge of karma; and this means that
I58 WAR AND CIVILIZATION
they cannot really turn into inanimate foundation-stones, but

must ever be stirring—like the dragon’s-tooth seed that they are
—to spring to the surface again in a fresh crop of slaying and
dying gladiators. Under its serene mask of effortless supremacy
the Oecumenical Peace of a universal state is fighting, all the
time, a desperate losing battle against an unexorcized demon of
Violence in its own bosom; and we can see this moral struggle
being waged in the guise of a conflict of policies.
Can the Jovian ruler of a universal state succeed in curbing
that insatiable lust for further conquests which was fatal to
Cyrus? And, if he cannot resist the temptation debellare super-
bos, can he at any rate bring himself to act on the Virgilian
counsel parcere subiectis? When we apply this pair of tests to
Jovius performance, we shall find that he seldom succeeds in
living up for long to his own good resolutions.
In the history of the Hellenic universal state the founder
himself set a practical example of moderation to his successors
by abandoning his attempt to carry the Roman frontier to the
Elbe, before he bequeathed to them his famous counsel to be
content with preserving the Empire within its existing limits,
without attempting to extend it. Augustus’ attitude is illus¬
trated by Strabo’s account of a current controversy over the
question whether the Augustan rule might allow of a British
exception. And, although this particular breach of the rule was
eventually committed with an apparent impunity, Trajan after¬
wards demonstrated the soundness of Augustus’ judgement
when he ventured to break the rule on the grand scale by at¬
tempting to realize Crassus’ and Julius’ and Antonius’ dream
of conquering the Parthian Empire. The price of a momentary
advance from the hither bank of Euphrates to the foot of Za¬
gros and the head of the Persian Gulf was an intolerable strain
upon the Roman Empire’s resources in money and men. Insur¬
rections broke out not only in the newly conquered territories
between the conquerer’s feet but also among the Jewish Dias¬
pora in the ancient dominions of the Empire in his rear; the
clear sky of a nascent Hellenic ‘Indian Summer’ was momen¬
tarily overcast; and it took all the prudence and ability of
Trajan’s successor Hadrian to liquidate the formidable legacy
which Trajan’s sword had bequeathed to him. Hadrian
promptly evacuated all his predecessor’s Transeuphratean con¬
quests; yet he was able to restore only the territorial, and not
the political, status quo ante bellum. Trajan’s act of aggression
made a deeper mark on Transeuphratean Syriac minds than
Hadrian’s reversal of it; and we may date from this epoch the
beginning of a change of temper in the Transeuphratean tract
of the Syriac World which was fostered by Roman relapses
into a recourse to the sword until the reaction in Iran declared
itself at length in sensational fashion in the revolutionary re¬
placement of an Arsacid King Log by a Sasanid King Stork,
and the consequent resumption of that militant counter-attack
against the Hellenic intruder which had succeeded in evicting
Hellenism from its footholds in Iran and ’Iraq in the second
century b.c., but had latterly been in suspense since the conclu¬
sion by Augustus, in 20 b.c., of a Romano-Parthian ‘peace with
honour.’ Under the auspices of the second Padishah of the
Sasanian line the Trajanic breach of the Augustan rule in a.d.
113-17 found its nemesis in a.d. 260 in a repetition of the disas¬
ter which had been inflicted upon Roman arms in 53 b.c. by
the Parthians.
In Egyptiac history we see the Theban sword that had been
drawn in a Befreiungskrieg by Amosis (imperabat 1580-1558
b.c.) and wielded in a revanche by Thothmes I (imperabat
1545-1514 b.c.) being deliberately sheathed by the Empress
Hatshepsut (imperabat 1501-1479 b.c.)—only to be wilfully
drawn and wielded again by Thothmes III (imperabat i479—
1447 b.c.) as soon as Death had removed Hatshepsut’s restrain-
i6o WAR AND CIVILIZATION
ing hand. The karma of the Militarism which governed the

policy of ‘the New Empire’ for the next hundred years (circa
I479~137^ B-c-) could not be extinguished by Ikhnaton’s pas¬
sionate repudiation of a policy which he had inherited from
four predecessors-any more than the nemesis of Nebuchad¬
nezzar’s militarism could be averted by Nabonidus’ childish
device of ignoring the unwelcome realities of his imperial her¬
itage and seeking to forget the cares of state in the delights of
archaeology.
In the history of the Ottoman Power Mehmed the Con¬
queror (imperabat a.d. 1451-81) deliberately limited his ambi¬
tions to the enterprise of making his Pax Ottomanica coter¬
minous with the historic domain of Orthodox Christendom
(not including its offshoot in Russia); and he resisted all temp¬
tations to encroach upon the adjoining domains of Western
Christendom and the Iranic World. But—partly, no doubt, be¬
cause his hand was forced by the aggressiveness of Isma’il Shah
Safawl-Mehmed’s successor Selim the Grim (imperabat a.d.
1512-20) broke Mehmed’s self-denying ordinance in Asia,
while Selim’s successor Suleyman (imperabat a.d. 1520-66)
committed the further error-which was ultimately still more
disastrous and which could not be excused on Selim’s plea of
foice majeure—of breaking the same self-denying ordinance in
Europe as well. In consequence the Ottoman Power was rap¬
idly worn down by the grinding friction of a perpetual warfare
on two fronts against adversaries whom the ’Osmanli could re¬
peatedly defeat in the field but could never put out of action.
And this Selimian and Suleymanian perversity came to be so
deeply ingrained in the statecraft of the Sublime Porte that
even the collapse that followed Suleyman’s death did not pro¬
duce any lasting revulsion in favour of a Mehmedian modera¬
tion. The squandered strength of the Ottoman Empire had no
sooner been recruited by the statesmanship of the Kopriiliis
FAILURE OF THE SAVIOUR WITH THE SWORD l6l
than it was expended by Qara Mustafa on a new war of aggres¬

sion against the Franks which was intended to carry the Otto¬
man frontier up to the eastern bank of the Rhine. Though he
never came within sight of this objective, Qara Mustafa did
emulate Suleyman the Magnificent’s feat of laying siege to
Vienna. But in a.d. 1682-3, as in A,D- I529’ the boss the
Danubian carapace of Western Christendom proved to be too
hard a nut for Ottoman arms to crack; and on this second occa¬
sion the ’Osmanlis did not fail before Vienna with impunity.
The second Ottoman siege of Vienna evoked a Western coun¬
ter-attack which continued, with no serious check, from a.d.
1683 to a.d. 1922, and which did not expend itself until the
’Osmanlis had not only been bereft of their empire but had
even been compelled to renounce their ancestral Iranic culture
as well, as the price of retaining possession of their homelands
in Anatolia.
In thus wantonly stirring up a hornets’ nest in Western Chris¬
tendom, Qara Mustafa, like Suleyman before him, was commit¬
ting the classic error of Xerxes when the successor of Darius
launched his war of aggression against Continental European
Greece and thereby provoked a Hellenic counter-attack which
immediately tore away from the Achaemenian Empire the
Greek fringe of its dominions in Asia, and which ultimately
led to the destruction of the Empire itself when the work begun
by the sea-power of Athens under the auspices of Themistocles
was taken up and completed by the land-power of Macedon
under the auspices of Alexander.
It will be seen that, on the first of our two tests of ability
to sheathe the sword, the rulers of universal states do not make
a very good showing; and, if we now pass from the test of non¬
aggression against peoples beyond the pale to our second test
of toleration towards the populations that are already living
under the vaunted Pax Oecumenica, we shall find that Jovius
\6i WAR AND CIVILIZATION
fares hardly better in this second ordeal—though the receptivity

which is characteristic of empire-builders might seem likely,
on the face of it, to make toleration come easy to them.
The Roman Imperial Government, for example, made up its
mind to tolerate Judaism and abode by this resolution in the
face of severe and repeated Jewish provocations; but its for¬
bearance was not equal to the more difficult moral feat of ex¬
tending this toleration to a Jewish heresy that had set itself to
convert the Hellenic World. In the very first collision between
the Roman authorities and the Christian Church the Imperial
Government took the extreme step of making the profession
of Christianity a capital offence; and this declaration of war to
the death was the only one of Nero’s acts of savagery that was
not rescinded by the tyrant’s successors on the Imperial Throne.
The motive of this proscription of Christianity as a religio non
licita by the rulers of the Hellenic universal state is as signifi¬
cant as the sequel. The element in Christianity that was intoler¬
able to the Imperial Government was the Christians’ refusal to
accept the Government’s claim that it was entitled to compel
its subjects to act against their consciences. The Christians were
disputing the sword’s prerogative; and, in defence of its laesa
majestas, the weapon which Augustus had contrived to sheathe
came shooting out of its scabbard again, like a snake out of its
hole, to join battle, this time, with a spiritual power which
could never be defeated by the strokes of a temporal weapon.
So far from checking the propagation of Christianity, the mar¬
tyrdoms proved to be the most effective agencies of conver¬
sion; and the eventual victory of the Christian martyr’s spirit
over the Roman ruler’s blade bore out Tertullian’s triumphantly
defiant boast that Christian blood was seed.
The Achaemenian Government, like the Roman, set itself in
principle to rule with the consent of the governed and was
/likewise only partially successful in living up to this policy in
practice. It did succeed in winning the allegiance of the Phoeni¬

cians and the Jews, but it failed in the long run to conciliate
either the Babylonians or the Egyptians. The magnanimity
with which the Tyrians were forgiven by Cambyses for their
refusal to serve against their Carthaginian kinsfolk, and the
Jews forgiven by Darius for Zerubbabel’s abortive essay in
high treason, sufficed to confirm a loyalty which these two
Syriac peoples were inclined in any case to feel towards a
Great King whose sword had saved them from Babylonian op¬
pressors in the one case and in the other from Greek competi¬
tors. But the conciliation of the Babylonian priesthood by
Cyrus and of the Egyptian priesthood by Darius was an
ephemeral tour de force; no tact or cajolery could permanently
reconcile the heirs of the Babylonic and Egyptiac Civilizations
to an alien domination; and Egypt and Babylon never ceased
to rise in revolt till Babylon was crushed by Xerxes and Egypt
by Ochus.
The ’Osmanlis had no better success in conciliating their
raliy eh—notwithstanding the wideness of the scope of the cul¬
tural, and even civil, autonomy that they conceded to them in
the millet system. The liberality of the system de jure was
marred by the high-handedness with which it was applied de
facto; the Ottoman Government was never able completely to
win the ra‘iyeh's hearts; and the perilously practical fashion in
which they displayed their disloyalty, as soon as a series of
Ottoman reverses afforded an opening for treachery on the
rcf iyeh's part, gave the successors of Selim the Grim some rea¬
son to regret that this ruthless man of action had been deterred
(if the tale were true), by the joint exertions of his Grand Vezlr
Piri Pasha and his Sheykh-al-Islam Jemali, from carrying out a
plan to exterminate the Orthodox Christian majority of his
subjects—as he did in fact exterminate an Imami Shi’i minority.
In exerting himself, with success, to defeat Sultan Selim’s atro-
cious project, Sheykh Jemali was moved not merely by his own
personal feelings of humanity but by the standing orders of the
Islamic Canon Law which it was the Sheykh’s professional
duty to uphold. The Sherfah required the Commander of the
Faithful, or his deputy, to give quarter to non-Muslims who
were ‘People of the Book’ if these forbore to resist the sword
of Islam by force of arms, and so long as they gave and kept an
undertaking to obey the Muslim authorities and to pay a super¬
tax. This was, in truth, the principle which had been followed
by the Primitive Arab Muslim empire-builders, and their faith¬
fulness to it is one of the considerations that account for the
amazing rapidity with which they accomplished their work. As
soon as the preliminary raids gave place to permanent conquests
on the grand scale, the Caliph ’Umar intervened to protect the
conquered populations against the rapine, and even against the
rights, of the Arab Muslim soldiery; it was ’Uthman’s unwill¬
ingness to abandon ’Umar’s policy that cost the third of the
Caliphs his life; and in this matter the Umayyads showed them¬
selves worthy successors of the ‘Rightly Guided’ Four. Mu-
’awiyah set an example of tolerance which was followed not
only by the later Umayyads but also by the earlier ’Abbasids.
Yet the latter days of the ’Abbasid regime did not pass without
being disgraced by outbreaks of mob violence against Chris¬
tian subjects of the Caliphate who had by this time dwindled
in numbers from a majority to a minority of the population as
a result of the mass-conversions to Islam that heralded the
break-up of the universal state and the approach of a social
interregnum.
Our survey has revealed the suicidal importunity of a sword
that has been sheathed after having once tasted blood. The pol¬
luted weapon will not rust in its scabbard, but must ever be
itching to leap out again—as though the disembodied spirit of
the would-be saviour who first had recourse to this sinister in-
strument could now find no rest until his sin of seeking salva¬
tion along a path of crime had been atoned for by the agency of
the very weapon which he once so perversely used. An instru¬
ment that is powerless to save may yet be potent to punish; the
penitently sheathed sword will still thirst implacably to carry
out this congenial duty; and it will have its way in the end when
it has Time for its ally. In the fulness of Time the din of battle
which has ebbed away towards the fringes of Civilization till it
has passed almost out of ear-shot will come welling back again
in the van of barbarian war-bands that have gained the upper
hand over the garrisons of the limes by learning from them, in
the effective school of a perpetual border warfare, the winning
tricks of the professional soldier’s trade; or, more terrifying
still, the dreadful sound will come welling up again in the re¬
surgence of an Internal Proletariat that has turned militant once
more—to the consternation of a Dominant Minority which has
been flattering itself that this profanum vulgus has long since
been cowed or cajoled into a settled habit of submissiveness.
The spectres of war and revolution that have latterly passed
into legend now once again stalk abroad, as of old, in the light
of day; and a bourgeoisie which has never before seen blood¬
shed now hastily throws up ring-walls round its open towns out
of any materials that come to hand: mutilated statues and dese¬
crated altars and scattered drums of fallen columns and inscribed
blocks of marble reft from derelict public monuments. These
pacific inscriptions are now anachronisms; for the ‘Indian Sum¬
mer’ is over; the ‘Time of Troubles’ has returned; and this
shocking calamity has descended upon a generation which has
been brought up in the illusory conviction that the bad times of
yore have gone for good!
Date Due
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Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 1
War and civilization / Arnold
0022940
TRENT UNIVERSITY
CB63 .T6 4 2 1950 UTLAS

Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 1889-
[A study of history. Selections]
War and civilization
199347
199347

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TRENT UNIVERSITY

a study of history and this selection from it

War and Civilization

FROM A STUDY OF HISTORY

Oxford University Press

Printed in the United States of America

The contents of this small volume have been extracted, by

scourges that leaps at once to our minds; yet, though Slavery,

ability to organize ‘man-power’; but, as soon as this happens,

The most obvious lion in the path of the strategy of Paci¬

also an unlimited scope in other forms of human encounter

security or who break it; and this peace-keeping world-power

Preface by Arnold J. Toynbee O

y \. The War-Stricken World of To-Day, 3

in. Sparta, the Military State, 26 C

iv. Assyria, the Strong Man Armed, 55

vi. The Intoxication of Victory, 104

vii. Goliath and David, 112

ix. The Failure of the Saviour with the Sword, 142

The War-Stricken World of To-day

Unlike our forebears, we in our generation feel from the depths

breathing-space between a first and a second paroxysm of its

A Principle of Toleration which unexpectedly clothed the

withstanding. And the cause of this disastrous impotence is

Wars of Nationality are to be taken as the second paroxysm

ushered in a universal state has been a self-inflicted ‘knock-out

I dreamed, and behold I saw a man cloathed with rags, standing

It was not without just cause that Christian was so greatly

What response to this challenge is Christian going to make?

Militarism and the Military Virtues

That Militarism is suicidal is a proposition which will hardly

earn their living by occupations which do not entail the risking

mired in a milieu in which social forces are not sharply distin¬

Down to modern times, War was almost universally regarded as

s'hbTnd6 /n Warri°r’ and Submitted willingly to his leader-

geSLtl” .“r17 Pr0feSi°n °Pen “ * -d a

The gentleman and scholar who has communicated these

wLa^r’to make an iuummating comparis°"

In prehistoric times, before the domestication of animals the

The comparison is illuminating because, in the case of hunt¬

has been glorified in a classic passage from the pen of a later

Perpetual Peace is a dream—and not even a beautiful dream—and

In this extravagant eulogy of War there is a note of passion,

were far more formidable than their frivolous eighteenth-

It is when an institution no longer appears necessary, that fan¬

In this contest between the pacifist who seeks to abolish ‘the

sacrifice, and dedication to country.’ And in an article in the

Western Plebs Christiana received such a grievous moral shock

festly genuine, lest the realization of the pacifist’s dream may

assumption is correct, or whether on the other hand Christian¬

an eternal principle of goodness has glimmered darkly for a

There is hardly any occurrence or phenomenon about which we

If we have persisted in the worship of War when the good¬

one form of the nemesis of creativity. And our sin is aggra¬

translated into a spiritual warfare of all men united in the serv¬

When Plato conceived his Utopia, he was inspired by the ac¬

came into existence as a result of this general movement of

House. The First Messeno-Spartan War (circa 736-720 b.c.),

on Rome. The Second Messeno-Spartan War changed the

The way ... in which those primitive institutions, which other¬

Hellenic tradition attributed not only the reconstruction of

1 Nilsson, M. P.: ‘Die Grundlagen des Spartanischen Lebens,’ in Klio

In the Spartan system the outstanding feature—the feature